00:02The Nature Conservancy's mission is to preserve plants, animals, and natural communities...

00:07...that represent the diversity of life on earth, so our history has been devoted to developing mechanisms...

00:14...to secure the places that capture that natural diversity, and we've done it traditionally by buying land.

00:20More recently, though, we've moved into other strategies, particularly as we work outside the United States.

00:25It's really about intersecting with human use of landscapes.

00:29And that will require even more sophisticated understanding of how landscapes work...

00:33...and particularly how people living in and working on those landscapes affect natural systems.

00:40Therefore, GIS will be even more important as we move into this exciting but challenging new arena.

00:46We wanted to jump into the next level and truly have an enterprise GIS program...

00:51...and not just talking about hardware and software.

00:55For us, an enterprise GIS program means developing a strategy to implement geospatial technologies throughout the organization...

01:03...and in particular it means supporting the community and empowering the community of users...

01:08...current users, and also future users.

01:11You know, a good example of how information systems serve as a strategy is our work in China.

01:18We began working in the northwest Hunan Province about 10, 12 years ago...

01:23...in an area that we had identified as having great biological significance.

01:27And from that work, the national government, the Chinese national government...

01:32...saw the potential for a countrywide system of protected areas...

01:39...and approached us and asked us to help prepare a so-called blueprint for all of China.

01:45And this is a very, very exciting opportunity.

01:49There's been a real change in the paradigm at The Nature Conservancy that's helping our enterprise GIS program to succeed...

01:55...and that is no longer seeing GIS or geographic information systems as a side component that one sticks onto an application...

02:05...or a system, but really seeing it as a foundation on which all applications can be built, and we're really moving in that direction...

02:13...and I know that it's going to empower our organization to do better science.

02:18So although The Nature Conservancy has had a very successful history, 55 years of history...

02:24...we realize we have to keep challenging ourselves.

02:28So just in the last couple of years, we have developed a goal for the next 10 years, for the year 2015.

02:36And that goal is built around focus on the world's major habitat types.

02:42We realize that there really isn't sufficient understanding of the status and the needs for the world's major habitat types.

02:52And so it's necessary for us to assemble for the first time ever a global set of data on the world's major habitat types.

03:00And this is really very exciting, not only for informing our own actions in this goal...

03:05...but for helping us work with other conservation actors around the world.