For the past 22 years, anyone wanting to learn about Guam's native and most common animals would reach for a pad of fact sheets created by collaborating natural resource agencies. High demand, numerous printings, staff turnover, and changing technologies meant the fact sheets were in need of a makeover.
"No one had any sets to give away and the community still wanted them and school teachers really needed them," says Annie Flores, resource information and education officer for Guam's Coastal Zone Management Program. "It was time to get it Web-ready for wider distribution and access."
The Fish and Wildlife Fact Sheets feature color photographs of the island's 80 most important land and marine animals, their native Chamorro, English, and scientific names, and pertinent information on the animal, its habitat, key ecological concepts, such as predator-prey relationships, and any regulatory information. Pads of 40 fact sheets were first created in 1981 by the Guam Department of Agriculture's Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources with Coastal Management Program funding, and evolved to the set of 80 that is coveted by teachers today.
"They're one of our most popular public outreach tools," notes Trina Leberer, Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources fisheries supervisor. "They were originally distributed to teachers, but it became clear from the number of requests that they had a much wider audience," including the media, new residents, and recreational fishermen.
Over time, the design of the sheets began to look dated, the original layouts were lost, so print quality went down, and in some cases regulations and other information changed or was found to be incorrect.
The sets became so scarce, "teachers started to hoard them," reports Leberer. An environmental education committee, which includes representatives from a number of Guam's government agencies, decided they were "important enough to revive, clean up, and make more attractive."
The group decided that everything should be put in a digital format, which would make it easier to update and print. This would also allow the Department of Agriculture to put the fact sheets on its Web site, which would ensure teachers always had access to the information.
Flores volunteered for the project, which turned out to be much more of a challenge than she imagined. "It was a logistics nightmare," agrees Aquatic and Wildlife Resources Chief Gerry Davis.
The original photographs, which included rare images of now extinct birds, were lost. This meant that Flores had to search numerous agencies' files for the earliest, cleanest copies of each fact sheet in order to have it scanned by a printing company that wasn't even on the island. Other changes included verifying and correcting Chamorro and scientific names and information, adding a table of contents, and numbering the pages.
In June 2002, the Guam Environmental Protection Agency paid for 2,000 sets of the fact sheets to be printed, and is tracking the distribution to "get a better idea of who's using them and who needs them," Davis says. The digitized information also will be distributed on CD-ROM and over the Internet.
"They're incredible," Flores says of the fact sheets. "They meet so many mission objectives. . . It's just so satisfying now to see it being used, and have people excited about all the different formats they can be reproduced in."
For more information on Guam's Fish and Wildlife Fact Sheets, contact Trina Leberer at (671) 735-3984 or tleberer_1999@yahoo.com, or Annie Flores at (671) 475-9671 or marflor@mail.gov.gu.
