MOVING TOWARD OPEN GEOSPATIAL SYSTEMS: THE UN OPEN GIS INITIATIVE

The UN Open GIS Initiative is an ongoing Partnership Initiative leaded by the United Nations Geospatial Operations. The Initiative, established in March 2016, is supported by several UN Member States, UN Field Missions, UN Agencies and technology contributing partners (international organizations, academia, NGOs, and the private sector) and takes full advantage of their expertise.The target is the creation of an extended spatial data infrastructure that meets the requirements of the UN Secretariat (including UN field missions and regional commissions), and then expands to UN agencies, UN operating partners and developing countries. The paper presents the activities done in the past year and the status of the Initiative.

Distribuição potencial de Vouacapoua americana Aubl. na Amazônia brasileira e o impacto da mudança no uso do solo

Modelos de Distribuição de Espécies são úteis na descoberta de padrões de distribuição das espécies, e das variáveis que estão influenciando. O objetivo deste trabalho foi descrever a distribuição potencial de Vouacapoua americana para o território amazônico, bem como verificar pressão antropogênica nos locais de ocorrência. Foram utilizados os dados de ocorrência da espécie obtidos por registros em herbários e variáveis climáticas derivadas de precipitação e temperatura. Modelos foram gerados através do algoritmo de máxima entropia e validados a partir de matrizes de confusão e da área sob a Curva. Dados secundárias de uso do solo, desflorestamento, pastagens e queimadas de diferentes plataformas foram processados no open gis QGIS 3.14. Constatou-se ocorrência da espécie ao norte da América do Sul. Na Amazônia brasileira, no arco de ocupação consolidada, foram identificados 294 focos de calor e 98,521 km² de pastagens. Estudos com essa abordagem podem subsidiar políticas públicas para conservação da biodiversidade. Potential distribution of Vouacapoua americana Aubl. in the Brazilian Amazon and the impact of the change in land useA B S T R A C TPredictive modelling has been used to analyze species geographic distribution based on conditioning variables. The objective of this work was to describe a potential distribution of Vouacapoua americana to the Amazonian territory, checking if the species is under anthropogenic pressure in the occurrence sites. Data on the occurrence of the species were used, using records in herbariums and climatic variables derived from precipitation and temperature. Models were generated using the maximum entropy algorithm and validated from confusion matrices and the area under the curve. Secondary data on land use, deforestation, pastures and forest fires were processed in the open gis QGIS 3.14. The species was found in northern South America. A total of 294 foci of calories and 98,521 km² of pastures were found in endemic areas of the Vouacapoua americana in the Brazilian Amazon. The result is that the species receives anthropogenic pressure, making it necessary for public policies to conserve biodiversity.

A WebGIS for Visualizing Historical Activities Based on Photos: The Project of Yunnan–Vietnam Railway Web Map

Historical photos have significance for historical and social studies. Especially, the introduction of Geographic Information System (GIS) and digitalized historical photos have brought more opportunities and possibilities for interdisciplinary studies and the convenience for normal citizens to participate in the landscape observation. To this aim, this paper first reviews the research related to historical photos and Open GIS, and points out the meaning of historical photos for the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway (YVR). Based on the collected data of original historical photos from archives and the fieldwork data that recorded the landscape along the railway from 2018 to 2019, a WebGIS of Yunnan–Vietnam Railway is designed and implemented with open GIS tools. All the data are processed in the QGIS as vector and raster layers and loaded in PostgreSQL as relational tables. Then, heatmaps are created indicating the density of historical activities of the railway company, the other historical photographers, and current touristic activities. Connected with the PostgreSQL database, the data are uploaded to GeoServer for more GIS functionalities. Finally, the whole system lives in a webpage, implemented in HTML and JavaScript with Leaflet, and the improved functionalities of the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway WebGIS include distance measuring, search engine, and historical information browsing. In the future, further research can be done focusing on the landscape changes along the railway and public participation during the landscape observation.

Modeling boreal forest evapotranspiration and water balance at stand and catchment scales: a spatial approach

Vegetation is known to have strong influence on evapotranspiration (ET), a major component of terrestrial water balance. Yet hydrological models often describe ET by methods unable to include the variability of vegetation characteristics in their predictions. To take advantage of the increasing availability of high-resolution open GIS data on land use, vegetation and soil characteristics in the boreal zone, a modular, spatially distributed model for predicting ET and other hydrological processes from grid cell to catchment level is presented and validated. An improved approach to upscale stomatal conductance to canopy scale using information on plant type (conifer/deciduous) and stand leaf-area index (LAI) is proposed by coupling a common leaf-scale stomatal conductance model with a simple canopy radiation transfer scheme. Further, a generic parametrization for vegetation-related hydrological processes for Nordic boreal forests is derived based on literature and data from a boreal FluxNet site. With the generic parametrization, the model was shown to reproduce daily ET measured using an eddy-covariance technique well at 10 conifer-dominated Nordic forests whose LAI ranged from 0.2 to 6.8 m2 m−2. Topography, soil and vegetation properties at 21 small boreal headwater catchments in Finland were derived from open GIS data at 16 m × 16 m grid size to upscale water balance from stand to catchment level. The predictions of annual ET and specific discharge were successful in all catchments, located from 60 to 68∘ N, and daily discharge was also reasonably well predicted by calibrating only one parameter against discharge measurements. The role of vegetation heterogeneity in soil moisture and partitioning of ET was demonstrated. The proposed framework can support, for example, forest trafficability forecasting and predicting impacts of climate change and forest management on stand and catchment water balance. With appropriate parametrization it can be generalized outside the boreal coniferous forests.

GEO-ANALYTIC FUNCTIONS FOR UN FIELD OPERATIONS – UN OPEN GIS: SPIRAL 3 GEO-ANALYSIS

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This paper presents a case of developing open geospatial analysis functions and a processing toolbox as parts of UN Open GIS Spiral 3 activities. A comprehensive study focused on the use of geospatial analysis at the UN operations has been carried out, which covered various UN operations such as situational awareness, security operations, military operations, protection of civilians, epidemiological analysis, and so on. Four requirements on development of 1) primitive geospatial analysis functions, 2) processing toolbox or processing environment like WPS request builder of GeoServer, 3) model builder, and 4) management of the model builder were clarified through the study. By focusing the first and second requirements, a development architecture was proposed based on JAVA and GeoTools. The scope of implementation and its assessment were described. In addition, a use-case introduced a way of using geospatial functions developed in this research to analyse geostatistic factors that affect to occurrence of Ebola disease. Through the use-case study presented in the paper, I would like to share the experiences and lessons about the development of geospatial analysis functions, which would be used as a reference for other developments and applications.</p>