Development Ecology Information Service seeks to facilitate access to information useful to local sustainable development efforts, especially those of small organizations.

Presently an owner-operated small business, the service will incorporate as a non-profit entity in 2005, or merge with the non-profit Tropical Science Center, of San Jose, Costa Rica. Starting in 2005, the service will collaborate with Tropical Science Center(http://www.cct.or.cr/) to develop a version of Geo e-Links that focuses on the Neotropics.

The goal of the service is to support development that is ecologically sound and sustainable. The strategy is to link local development workers with useful antecedent work in comparable environments, wherever it may have been done. A parallel goal is to harness the power of the internet, modern information technologies, and applied geography to the benefit of decentralized, small scale sustainable development. The Devecol information system and Geo e-Links Africa are the principal products of the service.

Development Ecology Information Service is prepared to help organizations with customized maps and to develop their capacity to create digital libraries and geo-reference site-specific documents and data for access via the internet. Also organizations are invited to submit geo-referenced information points for display on Geo e-Links map pages where links to the organization's site will be made.

Peter H. Freeman is the founder of Development Ecology Information Service and the designer of DEVECOL/Africa (a compact disk) and Geo e-Links Africa. He has worked for 35 years on the environmental aspects of development in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. He is co-author with Raymond Dasmann and John P. Milton of Ecological Principles for Economic Development as well as numerous guidelines on sustainable development and environmental assessment, prepared for the IUCN, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Mr. Freeman directed USAID's Environment and Natural Resources Information Center during 1990-95. He was an advisor for ten years to the Committee on Sustainability of Agriculture in Developing Countries and has been on the boards of the International Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture and Threshold, International Center for Environmental Renewal, which he helped found. Mr. Freeman holds graduate degrees in tropical agriculture from the Centro Agrónomico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza(CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica, and in geography from the University of California in Berkeley.

Updated: July, 2005