Public Participation Geographic Information Systems: using mapping to empower local communities

Maps, and satellite-based maps in particular, are not only cartographic tools, only tin can become empowering instruments enabling collaborative decision-making.

This concept is at the core of Participatory GIS or Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS). This expression refers to a participatory approach to spatial planning aimed at sharing spatial information and communications amongst people who share an involvement on certain places and assets.

The term was coined in 1996 at the meetings of the National Center for Geographic Data and Analysis in the U.s.a.. The approach includes several techniques for mapping and noesis substitution (from ground mapping to participatory estimation of remote sensing images), involving local communities and empowering them to co-build, apply and share geo-spatial information and maps.

IRMCo (Integrated Resources Management) is an ecology research visitor based in Malta that uses the PPGIS approach since its creation in the early Nineties. We take interviewed the founders of the company, Anna Spiteri and Dirk De Ketelaere, to know more than nearly this approach and better understand its added-value to concretely transfer the benefits of space-based information to local communities.

"Adopting a spatial perspective helps to place, understand and address problems of spatial relationships of land buying and use on the basis, and approach spatial conflicts with a different perspective." Anna Spiteri and Dirk De Ketelaere

To understand how this approach is applied in exercise, Anna and Dirk told united states about two projects in which IRMCo implemented public participatory geographic information systems. The start is SIRIUS (Sustainable Irrigation h2o direction and River-bowl governance: Implementing User-driven Services), an FP7 projection which ran between 2010 and 2013. The project aimed at developing efficient water resource management services in support of food production in water-deficient environments, with case studies in Kingdom of spain, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, and Bharat.

In such countries, h2o scarcity tin can issue, especially in summer, in water crunch, causing different sectors to compete for water use. Since agriculture is globally responsible for 70% of water utilise, the SIRIUS project aimed at using data from European satellites (from the Copernicus constellation, at the time chosen GMES) to assess irrigation water requirements, taking into account the interrelated economic, environmental, technical, social and political dimensions of the food-water challenge. While the intended users of the projection were public water regime, farmers were its chief beneficiaries.

Within the project, IRMCo worked with farmers and stakeholder organisations to motivate them to optimise irrigation water use in their communities using geospatial information as the basis for knowledge sharing and dispute resolution. With the support of "local champions" (people reputed and respected inside the targeted communities) Anna and Dirk gathered local stakeholders and asked them to wait at printed satellite images of their fields to capture local knowledge on agriculture and water resources and visualise how they could reintroduce traditional irrigation practices that proved to exist equitable and inclusive in the by.

As an example, in the Nile Delta, in Egypt, the communities living effectually the Sefsafa and Daqalt canals were complaining near inequalities in water distribution following the structure of the Aswan Dam (an enormous applied science work realised between 1960 and 1970 that even implied the relocation of several archaeological sites). Some farmers complained that the pumping activities upstream left very little water available to the farmers downstream, and particularly at the tail stop of the aforementioned irrigation canal.

After recalling how irrigation was managed before the construction of the dam, the farmers, who would take had difficulties working on a digital map, drew on the printed satellite-based map a fair and equitable mode to pump and distribute irrigation h2o in the surface area. The discussion resulted in a set of recommendations to resolve their conflicts, an impressive result for a community that does non have a farmers' clan to talk over collective interests like it happens in countries like Turkey or Spain.

Copyright: IRMCo

Always within the framework of the SIRIUS project, Dirk and Anna worked with the government water authorisation of Forquilha, a municipality with a Mediterranean, barren atmospheric condition in the northward-east of Brazil. Here, farmers living upstream and downstream of the dam had a conflict about irrigation water use. Likewise, in this example, they were gathered around a printed satellite-based map of the surface area and asked to recall their irrigation practices before the construction of the dam. Based on their recommendations, the authorities water authority was able to identify a better identify for the dam, which was then relocated in a menstruum of only six months.

"Information technology is amazing how farmers, who by and large lack Information technology skills, are immediately able to locate their farms on the printed satellite-based map and to brand concrete suggestions on how to improve their irrigation system", Dirk told us.

Irrigation direction is simply one amidst the many topics that can exist visualised and explored past looking at a satellite imagery in a participatory mode. On a smaller calibration, the satellite-based map of a metropolis or of a neighbourhood can reveal plenty of data that remains invisible to our eyes while walking in the streets.

In Malta, where Dirk and Anna take been living for almost of their lives, IRMCo used the Public Participatory GIS arroyo to empower local residents to safeguard green and blue open spaces in the southern part of the Thou Harbour surface area. Hither, the open up spaces were mapped using satellite-based data that was then verified with basis surveys. This experience was made possible cheers to the Mare Nostrum project (Bridging the policy-implementation gap in Integrated Littoral Zone Direction across the Mediterranean Bounding main Basin), a cross-edge project funded by the European Union under the ENPI CBCMED Programme.

The projection, implemented betwixt 2013 and 2016, aimed at exploring new ways of protecting the Mediterranean coastline, bringing together xi partners from Malta, Greece, Israel, Jordan and Kingdom of spain, including leading inquiry institutes, local municipalities, SMEs, environmental NGOs and port operators.

Valletta's Grand Harbour is a natural harbour that has been substantially modified over the years. The M Harbour was the base for the Order of Saint John for 268 years and its fortifications resisted the Ottoman forces trying to conquer Malta in 1551 and 1565. Used since prehistoric times, the Grand Harbour hosts a number of archaeological remains and historical buildings of great cultural interest.

Today, the Grand Harbour is a densely populated and congenital expanse, where open spaces are quickly disappearing. Inside the Mare Nostrum projection, each open space was recorded on a digital map through field mapping and classified co-ordinate to its accessibility, weather condition and other variables. In a menses of three years, Dirk and Anna organised x workshops with local residents and stakeholders, including the mayors of half-dozen municipalities of the areas, businesses, local administrations, historians, and academy researchers concerned with urban planning.

The community was invited to contribute with its knowledge on the archaeological, cultural, historical, dark-green and religious sites of the area and was then asked to draw on satellite-based maps on a digital tablet to connect the sites of interest through heritage trails that would pass through the remaining open spaces, thus highlighting their importance.

The goal of the project was to bring more tourists to the Chiliad Harbour while likewise safeguarding open spaces in the area.

Local community draws suggested eco-heritage trails in One thousand Harbour (Source: http://www.grandharbourcharter.net/)

Indeed, the residents of the One thousand Harbour were complaining about overdevelopment and pressure on open spaces and their lack of empowerment vis-a-vis the local powerful structure industry.

The application of the PPGIS approach in the Grand Harbour represented the commencement always application of crowdsourcing in Malta. The field surveys resulted in a wide range of GIS maps characterising open spaces, which are freely bachelor online: www.grandharbourcharter.internet

The maps provided the basis to organise a serial of seminars during which participants produced a "Local Communities' Charter for Liveable Cultural Landscapes in Malta's Grand Harbour, A Place for Our Children". The Lease is likewise available on the projection website for people to sign up to it.

The satellite-based spider web maps allow anyone to outsource local cognition of places of cultural and ecological value through online drawing of eco-heritage trails. Moreover, the maps represent a powerful tool to bring the voices of the residents to the decision-makers in Republic of malta. Indeed, residents use these maps to dissimilarity building projects in the area and accept go a reference for them.

The results of the project in Malta and the Local Communities' Charter for Liveable Cultural Landscapes in Malta's K Harbour, "A Place for Our Children", was launched during a media upshot in the presence of the Minister for Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs and Civil Liberties, Helena Dalli, and was signed by the representatives of Local Councils and NGOs and past numerous residents. The results of the projection as well caught the attending of a number of associations and media and were the object of a documentary that was broadcast by Telly Malta.

"Communities are commonly willing to participate in mapping processes if their purpose and outcomes are clear. Therefore, and not least to avoid creating false expectations, it is necessary to exist very precise about the whole process from the beginning and explain that: the participatory mapping process is aimed at achieving benefits for the community as a whole; the project'south research activities are geared to collect the local communities' views on coastal planning and management in their environs; and that the outcomes of the procedure may be used to influence policies and practices and then that communities' views are taken into account in decision making". Anna Spiteri and Dirk De Ketelaere

Currently, IRMCo has an ongoing project, AQUACYCLE, which brings together six partners from Hellenic republic, Lebanon, Malta, Spain and Tunisia, and in which they are engaging local communities in the drawing upward of domestic wastewater reuse action plans. The appetite of the project, which is funded under the ENI CBC Med Programme, is to bring about a much-needed paradigm shift in how wastewater is perceived as a waste product rather than equally a precious resource in its own right.

The projection'due south eco-innovative wastewater handling technology is aimed at bringing a depression-cost wastewater treatment solution, especially to relatively small-sized farming communities around the Mediterranean, who are faced with an unsure hereafter due to the impact of climate change on already deficient h2o resource. Pilot sit-in sites of the wastewater handling engineering are foreseen in Lebanon, Espana and Tunisia.

Public Participatory GIS might be the approach so much needed to finally bring the benefits of satellite-based information to local communities, offering people a concrete means to sustain their rights, perceptions and opinions towards public administrations. In this sense, this arroyo could stand for the Holy Grail for the appropriation of satellite knowledge and technologies by local communities. Nosotros are looking forwards to seeing PPGIS becoming a mutual practice, to be integrated in all projects aimed at developing operational satellite-based services.