The Instituto Nacional de Parques (INPARQUES) is the Venezuelan equivalent of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). INPARQUES received a World Bank loan of $11 million in 1997 to fund modernization of Venezuelan parks, including implementation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. They are expecting an additional $19 million in 1998. INPARQUES had no existing GIS capability, and in August 1997, requested the advice and guidance of the NPS on GIS implementation. Leslie Armstrong (WASO NRID National GIS Program Director) and David Best (GIS Coordinator, Redwood National Park) traveled to Venezuela between September 22 and September 30, 1997 to evaluate local need, existing capability, and available expertise. Here are some bits and pieces of their trip report:

Venezuela's park system began with the establishment of Parque Nacional Henry Pitter, in 1937. By 1958, three more parks had been created, and the government formed a small office to administer them. In 1974 six new parks and three natural monuments were added, and the park office was elevated to a section within the Ministerio del Ambiente y Recursos Renovables (Ministry of Environment and Renewable Resources). Today twenty-six parks and seven natural monuments protect representative examples of flora, fauna, and landscapes of Venezuela's major biogeographical regions, and reflect a far-sighted preservation vision. Approximately 16% of Venezuela's land is designated as national park.

INPARQUES is in a good position relative to South American park-systems for its ability to fund and successfully implement GIS. Venezuelan national parks include lands, which for the most part, are in public ownership. Most of the parks we visited have programs, while understaffed and poorly funded, designed to protect resources, provide recreational opportunity, and limit commercial exploitation. There are also enforceable laws and regulations, providing a means for staff to seek legal assistance. In many South American countries, parks exist in name only, and often to serve political purposes. Many have only token programs designed to protect from outside exploitation. Venezuelan parks are clearly above this description.

During our stay we visited the INPARQUES headquarters offices in Caracas and 3 parks. The parks were Morrocoy, El Avila, and Canaima. Throughout we had meetings and orientations with park headquarters and field staff as well as the Cartografia Nacional (equivalent to our USGS), PALMAVEN (the environmental clean up arm of Petroleos de Venezuela), and the University of Venezuela GIS facility.

Canaima is the best known of these parks. It is the home of Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world towering 950 meters above the Amazon Basin. It comprises 1 million hectares of a unique and largely unstudied ecosystem of tepuis or table top mountains uplifted on one of the world's oldest Precambrian sandstone shields. The park is undeveloped, consisting of an airstrip and a small group of tourist outposts providing housing and guest services. A new INPARQUES visitor center will open in the new year to help increase visitor awareness and education and provide limited office space. Several indigenous groups live in the park and maintain subsistence rights. They are an important but not well integrated part of the park's management considerations.

El Avila is located adjacent to Caracas, the capitol city of Venezuela with a population of 3.4 million, and covers 85,192 hectares. It has high visitation and is often utilized as a supply of fruits, nuts and wood fuel. Squatters also present a problem to the few rangers that are there to patrol and care for the park. The park facilities consist of a renovated coffee plantation and are currently used for housing researchers and park staff and as a training facility.

Morrocoy is a heavily visited Caribbean park, much resembling our own Biscayne National Park. The superintendent of this park, who speaks English with a New York accent, is very proactive and has created park income by charging for boating and camping on the many islands and cays. Park facilities are very limited but a new visitor center is in the planning stage. Management issues include caiman habitat restoration and protection, oil spills and sewage contamination, private in-holdings, and general public education.

Many issues confronting INPARQUES are similar to those facing NPS sites that are starting down the GIS road. It is natural for all organizations considering implementing GIS to desire projects and applications well beyond their current resources or skill level. This results from a lack of institutional understanding of the inherent difficulties of GIS and absence of knowledge about available (or unavailable) data sets. What is feasible to accomplish using GIS is based on a simple ratio of the value of a specific product to the cost and time to produce it. In GIS, there is a great variation of this cost-effectiveness ratio, and this depends in large measure on the availability of existing data. Upward of 80% of the overall cost of developing a GIS to maturity (a point where it supports routine production of maps and analyses) is related to data development.

It is important to be aware that the applications INPARQUES desires require robust data sets and advanced user skills, and there is a long and difficult road between need and success. Because most organizations must periodically document and prove the value of their GIS, we think it is useful to initially emphasize the more subtle benefits of GIS, which are less complex, less costly, and more likely to succeed in a short period of time. Balancing the benefit with its cost, as well as its likelihood to succeed, results in a different perspective of the value of GIS, and a more practical implementation strategy. Some of our GIS recommendations for INPARQUES are: