The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands

World Wetlands Day 2007 - Reporting for the Web

Reporting on your World Wetlands Day activities to the Ramsar Secretariat

Since the first World Wetlands Day, the Secretariat has tried to publish as many of the activities as we can that have been reported to us from around the world. On our pages, at http://www.ramsar.org/wwd/wwd_index.htm, you'll find thousands of long and short reports, formal and informal, illustrated and not, in English, French, and Spanish, from nearly 100 countries, going all the way back to 1997.

If you are a newcomer to WWD celebrations or have never before sent a report, you may be asking - Why take the trouble to send one?

Most importantly, the reports serve as a source of inspiration to new and old WWD actors alike about the range of possible activities that can be organized, whether at national or local level, by government bodies or by civil groups, in wetland centres, schools, television or radio studios, wherever. There are warm weather sampan races and bird counts, indoor symposia or children's painting contests in the northern climates - all kinds of interesting and potentially exciting suggestions.

The accounts of WWD activities can also be useful for reporting back to sponsors - both for us in the Secretariat and quite possibly for those of you working in the field who have had support for your activity and will have something else to hold up for your supporters. Similarly, collaborators and participants may find their enthusiasm spurred by seeing themselves on the Web.

Taken together, the reports make a useful history of the breadth and depth of World Wetlands Day as an environmental movement as it has grown over the years, and, in the end, many of the reports just make very interesting reading!

Time is always short in the Secretariat, and it will help if you observe a few do's and don'ts on reporting:

Do……

• Send your report as soon after WWD 2007 as possible and by May if at all possible, because the work of the Secretariat turns to other pressing matters as the day itself recedes. Some reports may be uploaded after that time, but we can't guarantee that.
• If you send us just a brief note, it will be posted directly to the reports index page pretty much as you have written it, listing you as having sent it to us.
• For a longer report, to help us create a Web page for it, please send us the text as a Word document and any pictures as separate images in JPG or GIF format, with separate captions or clear file names. If you care about how we should lay it out, you can send instructions or a model in Word.
• Alternatively, you can send a PDF already laid out, or a Word document with the images embedded in it. In that case, we would normally just PDF it anyway, since we haven't time to un-embed images already placed into Word.

Please don't…..

• Send very large Word or PDF files - in most cases, about 500kb is about all we can afford for most reports. For exceptionally grand ones, into which a lot of effort has been put, we could still post larger files, but please don't count on that. (A text file with separate images can be of any size, since we will resize the images ourselves.)

One caution: The policy of our Web site is that any material on it can be used freely, with acknowledgement, for non-commercial purposes. Therefore any text or images that you would like to send to us and we post with our WWD reports could be borrowed and used by other people, in many cases without your knowledge. (Requests for commercial uses, which are rare, we would refer directly to you.)

For further information about World Wetlands Day or the Convention on Wetlands, please contact the Ramsar Convention Secretariat, Rue Mauverney 28, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland (tel +41 22 999 0170, fax +41 22 999 0169, e-mail ). Posted 31 October 2006, Dwight Peck, Ramsar.