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QGIS at high school - the urban green spaces in Rada Tilly coastal town, Chubut province, Argentina |
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Introduction
In our region, Argentinean Patagonia, we have very few references about the application of GIS in High School for the construction of geographical knowledge as a mean to face territorial and environmental issues. The case of the urban green spaces in Rada Tilly coastal town analyzed by QuantumGIS, tends to demonstrate a methodology of an academic exercise that can project, with important reaches, as formative instances related to the geographical reasoning in students of 12th grade of the Abraham Lincoln School.
We started by the observation (inventory), digitizing the cadastral blocks and the green areas (tree´s canopy) using Google Earth satellite images. As a conceptual framework, we lectured about cartographic design, satellite images reading and interpretation, and specially, location analysis to contrast the situation (in m2) of the urban green spaces by inhabitant in Rada Villa coastal town, with values suggested by the World Health Organization -WHO- (a minimum of 9 m2 of green areas, by person, in urban areas).
About the project
The main objective of the experience was to lecture the 12th grade students, in the implementation of a GIS as tool to optimize and enhance the management of spatial information, and to provide a support to the decision making process.
Specific objectives:
- Student´s appropriation of a local issue (the Rada Tilly´s green areas related the 9m2 by inhabitant proposed by WHO) from a geographical perspective through GIS tools.
- Usage of GIS as a technical tool to validate of socio-spatial hypothesis.
- Verification of the viability of capture, processing, storage, analysis, recovery and updating of spatial data using a FOSS QuantumGIS.
Methodology:
To generate the project we continue the following methodology:
- Practical and theoretical lectures; mainly about the usage of QGIS and the benefits of urban green spaces and its territorial implications.
- Cartographic modeling, vector layers definition, development of GIS databases.
- Field work (trees data records and GPS locations).
- Vector digitizing of urban cadastral blocks and the tree´s canopies, using a Google Earth (GeoEye) image. In order to consider the amount inhabitants by cadastral block, we assigned an average value of 4 inhabitants by plot.
- Results presentation through thematic cartography.
Attribute table of “blocks” vector layer.
Conclusion
Based in the projection of an average value of 4 inhabitants by cadastral plot, we estimated that the current (2010) urban population Rada Tilly would go up to around 9.600 inhabitants. These people reside in 209 blocks and they represent 157.6 hectares. The average population density would be of 61 inhabitants by hectare.
The total inventoried green areas grow up to 150.736 m2 (15 hectares). Reason why we can consider that the green area by inhabitant in the study area is 15.7 m2 (the WHO suggested value is 9m2 of green area by inhabitant). This value proves a very favorable situation, as far as the environmental benefits, that trees offer to the inhabitants in this marine coastal town.
Distribution of urban green spaces (green) and population density by blocks (white to brown) at Rada Tilly coastal town, Chubut Provinc, Argentina.
Although the project was an academic exercise of High School, we deeply value the inventory´s results obtained by QGIS. Students worked with all academic rigor and seriousness, showing appropriation of the thematic (urban green spaces) and also of the tool (QGIS). It was a very enriching experience for them and also for the educational staff involved.
After the project experience we can assure that the FOSS QuantumGIS is an extremely recommendable alternative for capture, processing, storage, analysis, recovery and updating of spatial data, in fast and efficient form. We have such a positive impression of the software that we will start the use of QGIS in our university courses, replacing GIS Proprietary software that we have being using.
Authors
This article was contributed in September 2011 by Mauro Novara and Alberto Vázquez from Argentina.
 Mauro Novara is Professor of Territorial Information Systems course. Lecturer and researcher of National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Geography Department. Comodoro Rivadavia, Chubut Province, Argentina.
 Prof. Alberto Vázquez is a graduate teaching assistant of Territorial Information Systems course. National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Geography Department. Comodoro Rivadavia, Chubut Province, Argentina.
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QGIS and GRASS in Local Government Bushfire Hazard Mapping |
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Introduction
The Southern Downs Regional Council (SDRC) is a small-to-medium sized local government in south east Queensland, Australia. The council region, mainly the southern part, suffers from major bushfires. Bushfire is a real and present concern for the residents and landowners in the Southern Downs Region, and has resulted in the loss of life and property.
This project will allow the council and the people of the region to be more aware of the risk and to allow for better decision making in the future.
The Project
As bushfire is not only a problem for SDRC but also for the whole of Queensland, the state government requires that each local government identifies the bushfire hazard in their area via the State Planning Policy 1/03 Mitigating the Adverse Impacts of Flood, Bushfire and Landslide [1]. This kind of job would normally be done using consultants but was instead done by the council itself using a combination of QGIS and GRASS.
The GIS side of the project project was broken down into 6 main steps
- Slope assessment and mapping
- Aspect assessment and mapping
- Vegetation assessment and mapping
- Combining scores to identify the severity of bushfire hazard
- Field verification and qualitative assessment
- Final Maps
The use of QGIS and GRASS
QGIS, using the GRASS plugin, was selected as it provided the tools needed to complete the job and the interaction between QGIS and GRASS made it easy to process the raster maps and present them in a meaningful way to users. SDRC uses MapInfo for its main GIS system, however MapInfo’s addons were not as powerful as GRASS GIS for raster processing.
The QGIS GRASS plugin was used to import 5 meter contours of the whole region into GRASS which were then converted into a contour raster map using r.surf.contour. A slope and aspect map were then generated using r.slope.aspect from the raster contour map. Categories were assigned to different slope and aspect ranges and given a hazard risk sore. Vegetation areas were also given different risk scores. All the resulting raster maps were then combined using mapcalc and given a final risk hazard score. The risk scores are then divided into three main categories: high; medium; and low.
The final part of the process was field verification via the rural fire service. After the review process, QGIS was used to print the final maps for presentation.
As all GRASS commands can be run from the command line, all the commands that were needed to generate the bushfire hazard maps were recorded, for documentation purposes and for if the maps needed to be regenerated some time in the future.
Conclusion
Overall QGIS, together with the GRASS plugin, provided a great experience and a great final outcome for the council doing their own bushfire hazard mapping. The GRASS plugin provides a very easy to use interface to GRASS through QGIS. As QGIS is able to open the GRASS raster format natively, integration is very seamless and maps can be made with ease.
The project won an encouragement award at the Queensland Planning Institute of Australia state planning awards in 2010 [2]
References:
[1] http://www.emergency.qld.gov.au/publications/spp/
[2]http://digital.crowtherblayne.com.au/default.aspx?xml=crowther_pia.xml
Author
This article was contributed in January 2011 by Nathan Woodrow. Nathan is a GIS officer at the Southern Downs Regional Council and is studying an associates degree in Spatial Science at University of Souther Queensland
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The growth of QGIS at the Federal Department of Town and Country Planning, Peninsular Malaysia |
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Introduction
The Federal Department of Town and Country Planning, Peninsular Malaysia (JPBD) is a federal agency that advises matters on town and country planning. The scope of administration for the department however is limited to Peninsular Malaysia as Sabah and Sarawak in East Malaysia have their respective town planning agencies. Town and country planning is on the concurrent list in the Federal Legislation, thus, at the federal level, JPBD advises the Housing and Local Government Minister from which JPBD gets its patronage as well as to advise the National Physical Planning Council chaired by the Prime Minister. At the state level, the state director advises the State Planning Committee chaired by the Chief Minister. At the local level, JPBD advises local planning authorities on planning matters by being involved in the preparation of mandatory development plans. At Headquarters, the National Physical Plan Division prepares the National Physical Plan while four regional project offices assist in the preparation of State Structure Plans, District Local Plans and Special Area Plans. As public agencies were traditionally established base on their specialization, JPBD is the custodian of landuse information.
The Project
Quantum GIS (QGIS) was first introduced to the Malaysian Open Source community as a viable alternative to proprietary GIS for public agencies by JPBD at the Malaysian Government Open Source Conference (MyGOSSCON) in 2009 and to the Malaysian GIS community at the 4th National GIS Conference and Exhibition (NGIS) in 2010. JPBD has traditionally been a user of proprietary GIS thus the introduction of QGIS was a real eye opener not only from the point-of-view of Open Source Software (OSS), what more, OSS GIS. Open source philosophy was different thus QGIS felt alien, unsure and unsafe, not surprisingly the idea to use QGIS did not receive much support internally, in fact, it faced resistance in 2010 from the top managment all the way down to the support group.
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| MyGOSSCON, 2009 |
On the opposite side, request for technical talks on QGIS came from other technical agencies which JPBD gave to the Ministry of Works and the Department of Irrigation and Drainage. Other works to promote QGIS from JPBD came in the form of newsletter articles on QGIS to the Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC) at the Prime Minister's Department and articles introducing QGIS to the Survey Department's GIS Bulletin and the Ministry of Natural Resource's Public Sector GeoSpatial Bulletin. In the meantime, JPBD researched on developing a slope analysis module for QGIS's Windows and Ubuntu version.
The study highlighted pros and cons of customizing a module and the high level of commitment from the management needed to ensure its continual success and adoption. In 2011, JPBD began to further research on QGIS more as an analytical tool rather than a mapping tool in order to pioneer untapped modules or new approaches at exploiting QGIS.
The department eventually promoted the QGIS-GRASS package instead of merely QGIS as it was found to be most powerful and helpful for town planning purposes such as cleaning topology error and overcoming limitations of the default standard inputs. That was merely the beginning.
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| Northern Project Office get QGIS training |
In order to centralize and share findings in the use of QGIS for town planning purpose which could also be use in other fields dealing with spatial analysis, an unofficial blog established by the author called “QGIS MALAYSIA” at http://www.qgismalaysia.blogspot.com was made to generate a QGIS community in Malaysia. External agencies seem to have more interest in QGIS than JPBD itself and upon their request, JPBD gave QGIS training to the Fire and Safety Department as well as to the Ministry of Education whom later was convinced QGIS will be their de facto GIS tool.
Hearing this, JPBD's Research and Development Division took the initiative and requested for QGIS training and subsequently 12 persons were trained. Word of mouth (a godsend thing, though at times, extremely detrimental) spread that QGIS was indeed user-friendly, easy to use and at par with proprietary GIS in mapping task and could take on proprietary GIS when optimized with GRASS modules.
Interest in QGIS stirred and in 2012, with the support of all project office directors, an all-out effort was undertaken by the National Landuse Information Division that spearheaded QGIS to train the 4 project offices as they hold the greatest number of GIS users. By the end of 2012, it is anticipated that at least 320 staff throughout JPBD will use QGIS which accounts for approximately 90 % of GIS users in the department.
That is not all. States town planning departments have also requested QGIS training such as Perak including strong interest from poorer states like Perlis and Kelantan. If this catches on, it is anticipated that the use of QGIS may dominate states planning departments and even extend to local planning authorities, many of which are not wealthy. In the meantime, JPBD is seriously studying the use of the QGIS-PosgreSQL-PostGIS package for every planning office's client GIS-geodatabase server structure to serve as the foundation of JPBD's integrated landuse (iPLAN) network.
Outcome from using QGIS
- On the assumption of RM10,000 per proprietary GIS licence, the use of 320 QGIS installations will help save the federal government RM3,200,000;
- A total eradication of pirate GIS and increasing trust and confidence in the use of OSS in general and specifically OSS GIS;
- QGIS training has been simplier to manage. This means cross-learning between staff, divisions, public agencies and even local planning authorities that use QGIS can be more effective because the GIS used is uniform;
- The use of QGIS helps towards synergy with a PostgreSQL-PostGIS geodatabase which the department is planning to use as the foundation of landuse geodatabase throughout Peninsular Malaysia.
- It has been faster to process data verification and clean toplogy error.
- Users become more courageous and begin to venture into Google Maps and other Internet sources for secondary information;
- QGIS being user-friendly encourages users to be more adventureous and explore the many plugins available to their advantage and make their task easier.
- GIS a complex tool becomes a friend rather than a hinderance.
Author
 This article was contributed in January 2012 by Abbas Abdul Wahab. Abbas graduated as a town planner from Gloucestershire College of Arts & Design, United Kingdom in 1980 and has a Masters of Science in GIS & Geomatic Engineering from Putra University Malaysia in 2002. He is currently the Head of the National Landuse Information Unit at the National Landuse Information Division of the Federal Department of Town & Country Planning, Peninsular Malaysia. |
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Using QGIS for wildlife training in Tanzania |
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Introduction
Working in southern Tanzania, the Udzungwa Elephant Project (UEP) is using Quantum GIS for its training in wildlife research and conservation. In February 2012, it held a two-day workshop for the Ecology and Protection (anti-poaching) staff of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park, along with members of the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre.
About the Training
Trainees used their own laptops and were provided with the installer for QGIS 1.7.3 along with key data layers covering the National Park: protected area boundaries, scanned topographic maps, a DEM, roads, ranger posts, and habitat types.
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| QGIS Udzungwa |
By the end of the two days, everyone was able to add GPS download data, create and edit new layers, save map projects, design print composers, and save graphics files for inclusion in reports and presentations - this last feature is specially useful in using GIS to help in normal workflows. Even during the course, National Park staff were using the GIS to view the GPS locations of new-reported elephant carcass locations - the result of poaching - and to start planning responses.
QGIS offered us several attractions: not only is it completely free, but its open source nature makes it responsive to particular development needs; it runs well on older computers and has a relatively small installer; and in general we have found it user-friendly for newcomers to GIS.
The Udzungwa Elephant Project is based next to Tanzania's Udzungwa Mountains National Park, a range of evergreen forested mountains reaching over 2,500 metres. It studies the ecology of elephants in and around the mountains, with the aim of understanding how elephants move between different Tanzanian parks and reserves, and how such corridors might be maintained while reducing crop damage caused by elephants. More widely, elephants are a "flagship species" for the conservation of the incredible wildlife and landscapes of southern Tanzania.
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QGIS Udzungwa 2
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Special thanks to the US Fish and Wildlife Service African Elephant Fund for supporting this training.
Links
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Udzungwa-Elephant-Project/157164174392263
- http://udzungwa.wildlifedirect.org/2012/02/10/qgis-training-for-park-staff/
- http://www.udzungwacentre.org/
Author
 This article was contributed in March 2012 by Nick McWilliam. UK-based, he has been visiting Tanzania since 1996 to work with GIS in National parks and Game Reserves, with an emphasis on training, low-cost systems, and using GIS to help in applied research,
management and conservation. He also volunteers with the NGO MapAction, providing GIS support to humanitarian organisations in emergencies, and previously worked with the British Antarctic Survey, United Nations, Royal Geographical Society, and as a GIS Lecturer. |
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