The Iracambi Geographical Information System

Putting Land Use Planning in the Serra do Brigadeiro on the Web

A GIS (Geographical Information System) is a computer system for capturing, storing, checking, integrating, manipulating, analysing and displaying data related to positions on the Earths surface. Typically a GIS is used for handling maps, represented as several different layers containing information about the particular features contained within them. The Iracambi GIS system (I-GIS), of which you’ll find a detailed description on this page with all the technical details, is used for this purpose, as a location guide of geographical features and attributes, and also as a store of relevant data.

What we are doing at Iracambi is using this technology to provide information for all the people who need it for all the nine municípios of the Serra do Brigadeiro Territory. For example, when the mining company comes with a proposal to mine bauxite in the county, the county Environmental Protection Council has to decide whether they will allow it or not, and for that they’ll need the maps to assess the impact. Or, as another example, the Município plans to include a certain community into a Payment for Environmental Services scheme, but it needs to determine what the community’s contribution would be: it will need to see the land use pattern in the community. An on-line GIS will allow all these actors immediate access to this information.

However, the concepts of mapping and spatial planning are not really are not ones with which most ordinary citizens in our rural area are familiar. These ideas are not taught in local schools and most people would not know how to use maps even if they ever had an opportunity to use one. So when we talk about a system of relating maps to data, most people’s minds go blank. To get people to understand the concepts, we start with the “mapping our community” concept whereby, in a group meeting, members draw the main feature of the their community on the ground.

Here is another community doing the same thing, as part of the preparatory work in setting up an Environmental Protection Area.

However, when they get the idea and see what they can do with maps, they get really interested. The next photo shows a group of people from the local community looking at the aerial photos we took of their community: they had never seen maps or aerial photos before.

 

One of the principal activities of Iracambi’s development program is the setting up and management of local conservation areas.. By Federal law, these are required to have management committees and land use plan with zoning for different activities – conservation, intensive use, agricultural use. Generally speaking, in small rural counties like ours, the committee only exist on paper and the zones – if they have even been described – are of no significance. Local environmental law can endow the committees with real powers to licence environmental impacting activities with in the conservation areas, but since very few people have ever had exposure to such ideas, these laws have generally been meaningless.

What we at Iracambi are trying to do is make them work, but to do that, people have to understand what the principles are. The next photo is of the management committee of one of the local environmental protection areas: it was the first time they had ever seen maps of the environmental protection area and the first time that anyone had explained to them what it was all about. (The Iracambi representative is the tall young man on the right with the blue shirt).

For people to understand the map, however, first of all they need to understand the landscape that is being mapped. Here, too, Iracambi helps people to understand the concepts, since theses are not learnt in the school curriculum.. In this photo, some farmers are discussing with Charlie Evans, the Iracambi forester, different types of forest cover, and explaining to him the different classifications they use.

Charlie took panoramic photos with an ordinary drugstore digital camera, printed out the result on ordinary A4 paper, and the farmers explained in their language what that different types of vegetation are. Charlie noted this down on the photo by hand, and thus we got the first land classification map of this community. Then we returned with the GPS to reference it.

At the area level – be it the Territory (the group of nine counties that work together), the county or the environmental protection area - Iracambi helps the people responsible for planning the conservation areas. In the next photo is an area immediately adjacent to the State Park boundary that is in urgent need of being brought into conservation status. There are four landowners involved, (the plots outlined in color) and Iracambi is working with them to see how this aim could be achieved.

The white line is the watershed and the dark areas are forest patches. It is easy to see from these kinds of images where the critical areas for conservation are.
Finally when we reach the area planning stage, we relate the local images, the photos and the hand made maps to the satellite images.

Once local people have got the idea, we can go on to reach out to a wider audience, and transform the Iracambi GIS into the Serra do Brigadeiro Territory GIS.

We think the way to do that will be through a web-based GIS that anybody can access. We have already a map, similar to the one illustrated below, using  some images we got from the CIBERS (Sino-Brazilian) satellite to make a map of the Territory – we can’t show it to you here yet as the file is too big – and we have put together some images on Google Earth which you can see from the link:

As we already said, as the use of maps is not part of our culture, people who, in other cultures would use map frequently in their daily work – teachers, planners, public service – health, education, police etc- here would usually not use them or even have access to maps. Our local police station, for example, does not possess a map of our county, and even if they had it they have never been taught how to use it. To those who are not conditioned to thinking of maps as roll of paper, the use of maps on a computer screen will be more user-friendly. The first thing we would want to have on the system – to further our own agenda, obviously, will be information about land use and conservation area, but we can start adding other information as soon as we have capacity to do that.

We have been questioned to whether we would have sufficient band width to be able to provide an adequate service or whether we would not have to have the system hosted elsewhere. We believe that (1) we can keep the material we use formatted to fit low-bandwidth access – something of which, after all, we have experience of! and (2) we can use a web server technology that will allow aid access to the most commonly used pages whilst being a bit slower on the pages that are not called for so frequently.(the system used, for example, by news portals). These options we can explore with our partners as we go along.

See the Serra do Brigadeiro Territory on Google Earth, click here: click here to see Iracambi GIS projects in Microsoft's Live Earth.

Latest News: Report March 2008,

For more information about our GIS,visit this page

Want to help? We are looking for people with GIS skills to work in the program - click here for the profile.