Overview
Global Rapid Indicator Mapping System (Global-RIMS)The development of the Global Rapid Integrated Monitoring System (Global-RIMS) has been funded in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The original proto-type was implemented as the Data Synthesis System for World Water Resources (DSS) with funding from the World Water Assessment Program (WWAP) supported through the UNESCO's International Hydrological Programme. The DSS (http://www.wwap-dss.sr.unh.edu) is an operational, digital information system for water resource assessment cast within a geographic information system framework accessible via the World Wide Web. The system includes a broad suite of spatial and statistical data encompassing point scale and gridded socioeconomic and biogeophysical products for data exploration and download. This data are organized according to water indicator themes and is presented in the spatial context of the river basin to analyze the changing nature of water in relation to human needs and activities at the global, regional and case study scales.
The DSS framework was utilized in the development of the global River Basin Information System (RBIS) prototype, which was commissioned in 2001 by the UNEP Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA) to identify impacts and challenges of global change within selected, key watershed of the world. Using a common framework and methodology, the RBIS was cast to analyze the impacts to natural resources from global change using a variety of spatial perspectives including the capability to analyze global, continental, regional, river basin and country conditions. It thus provides a framework to perform comparative broad-scale assessments while also serving to enrich country-level and case study work. RBIS, version 1 (RBIS v1) was intended as a preliminary phase in exploring global change impacts and challenges on a limited scale, focusing initially on selected, key basins and a subset of relevant data themes derived from the TYGRIS (Typology of Global River Systems) toolbox. RBIS v1 operates at a 30" (latitude x longitude) for the global sub-domains. The most recent RBIS version (RBISv2, http://rbis-unep.sr.unh.edu) offers a 6" (latitude x longitude) resolution as well as dynamic and interactive functionality for assessing the contemporary state of African river basins. RBISv2 offers expanded functionality including zooming capabilities, interactive map query, display and calculation of upstream basin statistics, data layer calculator for user-generated calculations, generating upstream statistics "on the fly," time series animations and graphs, maps of monthly and annual climatologies, and names and locations of major cities.
The current Global-RIMS system expands RBISv2 data holdings to include regional, continental and global datasets at resolutions from 6" to 1 degree (latitude x longitude) and utilizes a display pyramid approach.
Further information is available at: Report on the Water Indicators Workshop