Overview of application of GIS

 By Moses Robby, Lae

RESOURCE management has come a long way with the formulation of policies and planning in consultation with environmental data through various rather conventional ways of presentation. Over the years one major problem faced by many government institutions and departments is that they lack innovative systems and tools essential in data capture and presentation, which are useful in making resource data easily read and understood to be able to tie policies and plans to the real needs of the people, and at the same time ensuring our resources are managed and used sustainably.

The demand for geographic information system (GIS) in urban and rural areas has been increasing over time as development data for planning and implementation of programmes becomes necessary. 

What is Geographic Information System or GIS in short? Experts and professionals refer to GIS is a computer based system tool that could really assist in areas of planning and policy making of resource management.

Defined by professionals, a geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. This is simply because the system was designed to capture and present geographical data, such as the natural environment, land and marine resources, climate, social and economical data and other topographical features.

The resulting information forms the basis for making quality decisions related to land, the oceans, lakes and resources management, as well as transportation and retailing.

GIS has a built-in analytical tool capacity that are specially made to manipulate geographical data to draw answers that range from simple user driven queries, for example what exists in a particular area, the population, soil type, rainfall and altitude range of a specific area.

One can query the GIS system to draw out specific information that can be generated from this system such as identifying drought and frost prone areas, areas suitable for growing/cultivating crops, identifying marginal areas affected by poor soil fertility, identifying extreme weather conditions, very wet and remote areas which many of them are inaccessible to major government services. All these variables can be identified on the map with the help of GIS analysis and processing systems.

The National Agriculture Research Institute’s (NARI) GIS section uses two of the PNG’s national GIS databases, the Papua New Guinea Resource Information System (PNGRIS) and Mapping Agricultural System Project (MASP) had been developed in 1989 by R.M. Bourke, B.J. Allen, P. Hobsbawn and J. Conway. These two database compliments each other with a common feature on land use intensity and population distribution on indigenous agricultural practices.

The section conducts training for organisations dealing with natural resource management, conservation and use, urban and district planning mechanisms for Districts and Provincial Capitals and finally to other National Agriculture Research Associates. The training can be tailored to suit ones needs based on individual requirements. The training uses open source software for all levels and best suited to meet your specific needs. The training also covers another technological tool  using Global Position System (GPS).

The NARI GIS section uses spatial technologies such as GPS and Remote Sensing. The GPS system allows to collect point locations of a place and the Remote Sensing technology allows to assess land use patterns and crop health status of a place.

Many disciplines such transportation and infrastructure, agriculture, forestry, mining, oil and gas are now using GIS as a tool for land use planning, utilities management, ecosystem modelling, landscape assessment and planning, market analysis, facilities management and many other uses rely on GIS. GIS has proven to be the best tool for the rapid growth of data collection, analysing and processing of vital information that are not only for planning and decision making but for comparative analysis such as mapping of weather patterns, climatic conditions and land assessment and valuation.

NARI GIS has a central GIS database platform that performs tasks ranging from field observations using GPS for data capture and downloading this data into a GIS system. The users are scientists whose research areas tie up with the locations on the map to show where and what crops species or land suitability of the area. This sort of information derived by GIS system is translated useful information to serve the land resource managers, market researchers, planners, administrators and policy makers.

The specific feature of GIS tool is the analysis of spatial data that refers to a data that has coordinates and can be mapped using the GIS software. NARI GIS Scientists uses ArcGIS software for spatial analysis which has the ability to derive information from a group of attributes specified with a query. An example would be using such Sequel Query Language (SQL) statements such as “how many villages have very good access to service or show me locations of very poor access to services, i.e 1 day travel to reach any level of service?” Queries are SQL statements that GIS reads when data is being extracted from the database using the spatial extensions of the GIS tool.