Mr. Basanta Shrestha, Mr. Pradeep Mool, Mr. Rupak Rajbhandari, and Mr. Walter Immerzeel attended the 6th International Conference - MAP INDIA 2003 (conference on GIS, RS, AP, GPS) from 28 to 31 January 2003. Mr. Shrestha and Mr. Mool then visited CSK Himanchal Pradesh Agricultural University, Palampur, from 30 January to 2 February, to discuss implementation of the glacier and glacial lake study in Himanchal Pradesh and the Uttaranchal Himalaya.

 

Mr. Walter Immerzeel attended an Ecoregional Fund Conference from 17 to 21 February hosted by the African Agricultural Research Council, Grain Crops Institute, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Mr. Birendra Bajracharya attended the ‘Closing Gaps in the Digital Divide – Regional Conference on Digital GMS’ at AIT, Bangkok, and a pre-conference workshop on ‘Open Source Software Tools for Geo-informatics’ from 25th to 28th of February.

Mr. Pradeep Mool made a presentation on the GLOF project, which is supported by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, Japan, at the ‘Third World Water Forum’ held in Kyoto, Japan from 16-23 March.

Mr. Sushil Pandey participated in the Asia Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum (APRSAF) from 23 to 29 March, at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), Republic of Korea.

MENRIS staff met with staff of the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) on 3 March, to discuss the ongoing collaboration on RHDC – HKH-FRIEND activities and the Transboundary Air Pollution project. 

MENRIS staff held discussions on 13 February with the ‘Optimizing Water in Kathmandu Valley Project’, which is supported by ADB, on mutual cooperation between ICIMOD and the project in relation to integrating the hydrological database developed by the project and reducing duplication of effort.

A presentation was made on 18 March to SNV and IUCN Country Representatives in relation to development of an ‘Indicators of Development, Nepal’ publication based on the newly-released Census 2001 data. Future collaborative work on this was discussed.

 Visitors

Dr. Moe Myint gave a presentation on his current GIS application development work in Switzerland and Bhutan in 29 January. He is currently engaged at the University of Freiberg in developing the Cartographic Fauna Server of Switzerland, and is actively involved in a Swiss Virtual Campus project called GITTA. He has also been providing consulting services to DANIDA in Bhutan on developing a soil database application and land cover mapping.

Mr. Maneesh Prasad and Mr. Saurabh Bagaria from the Centre for Spatial Database Management & Solutions (CSDMS), India, visited MENRIS/ICIMOD from 23 to 26 February. They gave a presentation on the data-viewer and community GIS.

Italian Partnership delegates visited MENRIS on 27th of February.

A team from ITC, Mr. Tom Loran, Ms. Sabine Maresch, and Mr. Dhurba Shrestha, visited MENRIS from 7 to 18 March for development of a joint proposal with ICIMOD. They made a trip to IAAS Rampur, Chitwan and visited Prithivi Narayan Campus and the Institute of Forestry (IOF), Pokhara. Mr. Basanta Shrestha accompanied them.

His Excellency Eng. Sharif, First Deputy Minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, Afghanistan, visited MENRIS on 13 March.

Dr. Ricardo Gomez, Executive Director, Bellanet. and Ms. Jayalaakshmi Parameswaran Chittoor, Senior Program Specialist, Bellanet, Canada, visited MENRIS on 17 March.

Mr. Nasrullah Bakhtani, Director, Soil and Water Research Department, Kabul, and Dr. Mustafa Jawat, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, Afghanistan, visited MENRIS on 25 March.

Barry Haack, Professor of Geographic and Cartographic Sciences, George Mason University, Virginia, US visited MENRIS on 27 March, to discuss future collaboration with ICIMOD on Kathmandu valley urban growth detection, a university GIS programme, and other areas of GIS and RS applications. He also provided MENRIS with two CDs of Kathmandu Valley Datasets: the USGS, Corona Image, 1967, and Radar Imagery.

 Staff/Internships

Walter Immerzeel joined MENRIS from 2 January 2003 as an Associate Professional Officer. He is funded by Dutch Government initially for one year and extendable for another two year.	Mr. Kelsang Thundrup joined MENRIS from12th December 2002 to 10 January 2003 to translate two training manuals into Chinese. These will be used to conduct GIS training in Tibet and to assist the university in conducting GIS courses.	TAAAS Intern Mr. Jin Tao returned to TAAAS on 11 March after completing three months on-the-job GIS training and exposure to GIS data development and management. He had been with MENRIS from 12th December 2002.	Mr. Maung Maung Than from Myanmar joined MENRIS/ICIMOD as an Associate Scientist from 17 January to 19 March 2003. After his return to Myanmar, he will continue to act as an ICIMOD focal node for the country.	Mr. Rajan Bajracharya has joined MENRIS as an intern from 1 February 2003 to assist on systems management.

Mr. Rajesh Thapa and Mr. Sudip Pradhan have moved to MENRIS from the former Mountain Farming Systems division and will continue to work on the ISNAR project.