A rather short story of shared GIS data layers in the hindu kush-himalayas: State of the art, justifications and urgent suggestions for a sustainable global data governance with open access and open source coming to the rescue

Abstract

Good environmental management requires a good information infrastructure (Huettmann 2011; Bush et al. 2017). It’s an essential foundation, and the future (e.g. Humphries and Huettmann 2018). However, this is a topic that most nations, their education, funding and their agencies still struggle with (Carlson 2011; Costello et al. 2014). As a matter of fact, transparency matters and is recognized as a key item for good governance. But despite a good start in 1992 with the Rio Convention, and GBIF.org, and with Google and Facebook on the rise sharing all sorts of information globally and strategically, we see no good use of tools and public efforts to move forward for a ‘global library of things’, any things, certainly data things and GIS things for serving mankind and sustainability. See ICIMOD (2018) and Peterson et al. (2018) for data growth but actual net data loss and leakage for biodiversity. See Mackie-Manson (2018) and Khalifa (2018) for an associated open access publication landscape perspective. In that respect, and beyond just GBIF.org, for the HKH region for instance the Shodhganga site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shodhganga) is of major educational and cultural importance and a reservoir hosting Indian and HKH thesis works from academic institutions while other sections and nations are still running behind on those efforts and culture.