DATA BASE DEVELOPMENT:OVERVIEW 

 Harry N. Coulombe 



DATA BASES AND HABITAT PROTECTION 



The seventies generated a national — even an international — awareness of the 

 importance of environmental quality to humanity. It was recognized that 

 environmental quality included living space for the creatures that share our planet, 

 not only for reason of their intrinsic value, but for the necessary function wildlife 

 serves in the biosphere man's life support system. 



In the seventies, it was recognized that a technological explosion had resulted in 

 encroachments upon the living space of fish and wildlife. In the United States, a flood 

 of legislation directly or indirectly called for information on the status and trends of 

 fish and wildlife and or their habitat.' 



It became necessary to consider the impacts of proposed land use changes, 

 resource management practices, energy development, and other expansions of 

 technology on fish and wildlife resources and habitats. These new requirements 

 highlighted the grow ing problem associated with gathering and organizing available 

 knowledge on the relationships between wildlife or fish and their living space 

 requirements — that of the short time frames in which decisions affecting wildlife had 

 to be made against the backdrop of other public needs and values. The critical need 

 for rapid methods of assessing impacts upon wildlife became apparent, and the 

 search for timely, effective, and efficient approaches to this problem has taken many 

 forms. 



In its broadest sense, a data base is any organized, systematic means of quickly 

 accessing data or information. It also provides a framework in which new data, 

 collected through accepted scientific means, can be stored. The traditional data base 

 of the professional resource manager has been personal files, accumulated textbooks 

 and technical papers, and perhaps similar resources belonging to one's staff or 

 colleagues. In the seventies, a plethera of paper (sometimes inundating the resource 

 manager) appeared; a trend toward automated data storage and retrieval and a rapid 

 development of inexpensive digital computing capabilities also occurred. The 

 organization and integration of existing data or previously collected information is 

 the theme of this section. 



Virtually every paper in this monograph explicitly or implicitly deals with some 

 level of data base development. The papers selected for this section are intended to 

 give some glimpses of the scope of activities already underway in the eighties. Robert 

 Bailey deals with the process of classification (organizing data and information into 

 units), which is basic to human logic. Jack Ward Thomas' paper describes the 

 integration of the relationship between wildlife living requirements and, the 

 "multiple use" mandates of major federal land use management agencies. Charles 

 Cushwa provides a perspective on the efforts to develop data bases, for wildlife 

 species, that are national in scope and supportive of a broad range of habitat 



The Author. Dr Coulombe has held academic positions in the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of 

 Alaska, and the Ecology Program, San Diego State University, for six years, where he became Program 

 Manager for the Center for Regional Environmental Studies. For the past six years, he has been an 

 admmistrator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Western Energy and Land Use Team. 



