World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT)

WOCAT, launched in 1992, is a project of the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation (WASWC) in collaboration with many institutions worldwide and coordinated by the University of Bern, Switzerland. It aims to promote the integration of successful soil and water conservation approaches and techniques into land use systems world-wide.

All technologies and approaches from the WOCAT database can now be viewed in Google Earth.

After downloading and opening this file, you will notice Google Earth showing a WOCAT banner and the WOCAT logo appearing in several places on the globe; this indicates that that specific country has one or more case studies in the database. When you zoom in to a country with a WOCAT logo, the logo will be replaced by one or more smaller icons (�placemarks�), together with a country code.

A green W icon indicates a technology, a red W is indicating an approach. Clicking on the (W) icon will open a brief summary of that specific technology or approach with some photos, a map and/or sketch (if available). It will also provide a link to the corresponding entry in the WOCAT database where you can find much more detail about this technology or approach.

The icons are unfortunately not visible as such in the on-line version shared with Google Earth Community.

Tip: in sloping areas with a high-resolution coverage it is interesting to activate the �Terrain� feature in Google Earth, which allows you to obtain a 3-D impression of the terrain around the described technology/approach.

We would appreciate any feedback, questions or comments you might have.