สำนักราชบัณฑิตยสภา

The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Volume II - 2010 Visut Baimai 113 which serves as all genetic resource for agricultural crops, pharmaceutical products, and for new approaches in biotechnology as well as valuable sources of traditional medicine. It has become clear in these endeavors that lack of knowledge of the taxonomy, distribution and ecology of native species will continue to be a major impediment to the discovery and development of useful animals, plants, and microorganisms, particularly those living in tropical forests. Realizing these problems, the Biodiversity Research and Training Program (BRT) was established in 1995 under the sponsorship of the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) and the National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC). The major objective of the BRT program is to promote research on and conservation and sustainable use of bioresources. An initial impetus for the establishment of the program was the despair of the nation’s leading natural product and chemistry researchers at not being able to properly identify botanical and microbial subjects of research, and the slow progress of inventory of the nation’s fauna, flora and microbes. There was also considerable concern that potentially important biodiversity resources vital to the nation’s economic well-being were not being well managed and protected. The BRT provides funding for researchers and graduate students in seven major program areas: systematics, population biology, ecology and evolution, socio-economics and traditional knowledge, data management, utilization of bioresources, and policy for biodiversity management and conservation. The BRT has promoted multidisciplinary research with emphasis on taxon-based, area-based, issue-based, and user-based projects. The BRT has become the nation’s main source of support for ecological and evolutionary research. The impacts of these projects on the nation are quite impressive when evaluated by a number of criteria, including publications of scientific papers and books and of magazines for general audiences for public awareness of bioresources, the numbers of graduate students trained, improvement of university graduate programs, new species described, etc. The BRT Program is now at the 15- year mark with a total budget of about 600 millon baht. With such obvious indicators of success, it is expected that the BRT will become a major part of a new National Center for Biodiversity Research and Training to be established in the near future.