From February 10 to 14, the Tour du Valat hosted a training workshop on “Introduction to National Wetland Inventories (NWI)”, organized by the Ramsar Secretariat with the support of the Observatoire des Zones Humides Méditerranéennes.
Practical training combining theory and fieldwork
This second French-speaking edition brought together 20 participants from 10 countries in Africa and the Indian Ocean. It followed a first session in English, organized in South Korea from September 9 to 13, 2024. Dedicated to an introduction to National Wetland Inventories (NWIs), the aim of this training course was to present them and highlight their importance in national strategies for the conservation, management and restoration of these ecosystems. It also aimed to share and explain to participants the various steps and databases required to facilitate their realization, including those derived from Earth Observation tools.
In addition to theoretical presentations, participants took part in practical exercises and field visits to a variety of environments: typical Camargue coastal wetlands in the Tour du Valat Regional Nature Reserve and the Marais du Vigueirat Nature Reserve; and a freshwater wetland in the Raphèle and Meyranne marshes, also managed by the Association des Amis des Marais du Vigueirat and owned by the Conservatoire du Littoral.
This training workshop is part of a three-year program, with three different annual modules, each in three languages: English, French and Spanish. The aim of these modules is to :
- transmit methodologies and best practices for carrying out HZIs to the Contracting Parties admitted to each session;
- develop their skills in wetland mapping, in particular using Earth Observation technologies and ;
- support them in producing and updating their HZIs.
Why focus on National Wetland Inventories (NWIs)?
HZIs are an urgent priority for the sustainable management of wetlands. An inventory enables us to establish the state of an area through three main axes: water, biodiversity and landscape, and socio-economic activities.
What’s more, INZHs simultaneously meet several challenges:
- Sharing and pooling, as they require consultation between stakeholders;
- A regulatory challenge, with the importance of these ecosystems taken into account in public policies, particularly for the management of resources such as water and land;
- Knowledge about the status and trends of these environments, the biodiversity they harbor and the ecosystem services they provide.
The implementation of an HZNI thus contributes to the fulfillment of several international commitments, notably the Sustainable Development Goals (particularly Goal 6), Targets 1 to 3 of the Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the land degradation neutrality objectives of the Convention to Combat Desertification, and the climate measures set out in the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.