Coimbatore: The Tamil Nadu Biodiversity Board will prepare People’s Biodiversity Registers (PBR) in the next six to eight months, its secretary A Udhayan said PBR is a list of all local biological resources within a block. It includes details of marine life, domestic animals, plants, herbs, trees and wildlife. It will also have comprehensive information on their extent of availability and knowledge of each species’ use if any, including medicinal and traditional.The state government has instructed biodiversity management committees in the state to enrol volunteers from colleges to collect and key in data. “The register has to be prepared and maintained by the committees, which will be instituted in every block in every district across the country,” Udhayan told TOI.A biodiversity register in every block is mandatory under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.While the committees are getting formed, the state government's biodiversity board has created a software in which the data for biodiversity registers across the state has to be keyed in. “The software will become a digital register and will allow us to access any information on any species across the state from one point,” the official said. “We have also recommended that the committees tie up with a local college where they can get volunteers to help with data collection and entry.”A biodiversity register is expected to help reveal the rich biological resources available in a geographic area. “We don’t even know what resources are available in different areas. This searching and collection of data will reveal a lot of unknown species and their uses,” chief conservator of forests Deepak Shrivastava said.On Thursday, the board conducted a training programme for forest rangers in Coimbatore and Nilgiris on their roles and functions as secretaries of their respective biodiversity management committees (BMC). “In Tamil Nadu, the state government has decided that the forest rangers will be BMC secretaries. So, we are first teaching the rangers how to form a biodiversity management committee, including the fact that it needs to have seven members and how they can recruit members,” said Udhayan. “The committees will be managed by the local bodies at the block level and can have members from the local communities like farmers, fishermen, traders or ordinary citizens interested in the environment and biodiversity.”“The Act also mandates that any company or institution should inform the biodiversity management committee of a block before collecting any sample for commercial or research purpose. The committee can agree or refuse or restrict it on basis of quantity or location. It can also ask for a share in revenue earned from collection of the plant or sample, like a percentage of their profit,” he added.

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