Implementing a GIS System and GPS Training in Rural Belize - Case Study Example

Implementing a GIS System and GPS Training in Rural Belize Belize is a Central American Caribbean country sharing anextensive part of its border with Guatemala, to the Eastern side by the Caribbean Sea and to the Northern region by Mexico. The country has the minimal population in the region with an estimated population of 338,597 in 2013. However, the country also boasts of the highest Population Growth Rate pegged at 1.97% in a given year. In 2012, the World Bank estimated the rural population of Belize made up of 55.41% of the population. Toledo District in Southern Belize is one of the country’s regions that are categorized as a rural area. The area is least developed and it consists of some of the most attractive tourists sites including cave networks, a wide range of cultures including that of the early civilization Maya and beautiful lowland plains. Fishing is also a key economic activity in the region and fishermen normally make use of their traditional dugout canoes for fly fishing and catching seasonal lobsters. Besides tourism and fishing, the Toledo District also gains its prominence from small scale agriculture due to the influence of the settlers from the US Confederate who introduced farming in the region. The economy in Toledo thus heavily relies on agriculture to ensure that the local people earn a living. Some of the crops that are popular among the farmers in Toledo include corn and beans. The farmers from the region also produce rice in large scale which is usually auctioned at the District’s Big Falls Rice Mill. The Toledo Cacao Association is similarly responsible for marketing the cacao product which is normally farmed organically. The most popular output that results from the cacao value addition chain is the Maya Gold chocolate brand. Cacao is such a popular crop in the Belize District and it’s celebrated during in a chocolate festival during the Toledo Cacao Festival. Besides rice, corn, beans and cacao, the farmers in Belize also grow additional crops such as hot peppers, chili, sweet potato, yams, coffee, plantain and oranges. Just like it is the norm in variant rural districts in southern and Central America, Toledo has reserved market days at its capital Punta Gorda where the farm produce is sold. The market days include Saturday, Friday, Wednesday and Monday. Agriculture and transportation are complementary in nature and it is imperative to also identify ways through which the GIP and GPS technologies can be used to further enhance the complementary nature of the two economic activities. Complementarity in agriculture and transportation arise from the need by the farmers to ensure that their produce reach their target markets in a good condition that makes them saleable to customers. The transport network in the region is made up of the recently developed Southern Highway and a variant of navigable bush roads that serve and link the multiple rural villages that dot the district. The James Bus Line is a regular bus service that links Punta Gorda and the remote villages. The farmer’s export needs are normally met by the Maya Island Air and the Tropic Air. GIS can also be used to efficiently manage the district’s transportation needs to ensure that the agricultural produce that is harvested in the Toledo reaches the market in good time and in good shape for selling or reselling. The deployment and utilization of Geographic Information System to the transportation model that is used in Belize’s Toledo district requires the expansion of the basic functionalities of the system that is being implemented to accommodate such items like network overlays and the linking of information that has been linearly referenced to the network. The required GIS functionalities have already been packaged in various forms that on both hardware and software platforms. The GIS transportation platforms represent a probable alternative for processing information in transportation agencies. Protecting the districts key agricultural support infrastructure will require a comprehensive system mapping. System mapping normally entails a four procedure approach namely assessing the system, collecting data, the mapping of main agricultural infrastructure and the implementation and training phase. The Toledo District is also home to four main rivers which are notorious for their rapidly rising water levels especially during the rainy season. The area terrain consists of undulating lowlands, small gentle foothills and flat coastal plain making the area to be prone to floods as a result of the rising water levels. The district’s agricultural activities are normally interrupted as a result of the floods. The minimal road infrastructure is usually damaged by the floods and the harvests are washed away. Effective management of floods and floodplains at Toledo will entail a combination of both preventive and corrective approach which will ensure that the region’s main economic activity is not interfered with and the people in the rural areas continue to possess a means of income. Preventive and corrective approaches of flooding requires the integration of data from multiple sources including land subdivision protocols, building and zoning requirements within the district and other forms of floodplain ordinance. Geographic Information System like ArcGIS can be deployed to aid floodplain managers in the district to easily map out the areas which are flood prone within a particular locality. Within ArcGIS, the geographic information that pertains to the district is kept in a database that can be easily accessed through the necessary queries. The system can then display such information graphically for the sake of analysis. ArcGIS deployment in the district can also make it possible to intersect and overlay different areas of the district so that the areas which are likely to be hit by the forthcoming floods can be easily known and targeted for the appropriate floodplain management practices or for mitigation. The Spatial Analyst facility from ArcGIS has specialized functions and tools for assessing landscape information and deriving and working with the resultant hydrologic information. This functionality can be used to come up with a flood forecasting model for the district that can make it easier for the residents to identify the parcels of farming land that can be easily affected by the forthcoming floods. After such an early identification, the famers and the locals can then proceed to prioritize for damage assessment or for remediation. For the four district’s rivers, the Arc Hydro functions and tools in the ArcGIS can be used to effectively capture the 3D characteristics of a channel including the channels vegetation, riverbed characteristics, terrain modeling and the physical characteristics of the channel. With the Tracking Analyst tools, one can easily analyze the geographic data that is time related. In this particular instance, the various levels of the district’s four rivers would be appropriate. The tracking analyst can also be used to explore phenomena and trends, analyze what if scenarios, historical analysis and to monitor and track events such as excessive track water levels in the rivers and excessive rainfall in the region that can lead to the bursting of the river banks. Information sharing is a key part of implementing the GIS system within the district. It is often advisable that wherever systems are deployed, then it becomes mandatory and more useful to share and disseminate the risk information to the various people who might have use for such information. The ArcGIS office plugin comes in handy to easily develop customized reports for sharing. As identified by the questionnaire, key stakeholders who will ensure that the GIS technology takes off in the region includes the farmers – both large scale and small scale, the key conservation groups in the region like the YCT, other multinational organizations in the region including Sustainable Harvest International, key farmers lobby groups in the district like the Toledo Cacao Growers Association and the country’s ministry of agriculture. The farmers are the target beneficiaries of the technology and as such they should be involved from the early period of its implementation. Agriculture in Belize is not highly mechanized as the area still faces key development challenges. Its categorization as a developing country by the World Bank is testament to this fact. The traditional approaches to agriculture, especially in the rural district like Toledo, make it a challenge to infuse aspects of technology as the population is always drawn towards conservatism. The benefits of the proposed technology should be demonstrated and explained to the farmers to their best understanding. The farmers should also be made to understand that they are the key ambassadors and drivers behind the proposed technology and that its implementation and the benefits and value to be obtained therefrom will depend on their cooperation. The agricultural produce value addition that the technology implementation portends for the farmers should also be discussed at length with the farmers as this will be a key selling point for supporting the technology. Farmers should be made to allow access to their pieces of land for mapping purposes. Any cost implication that the technology will imply to the farmers should also be made clear but the norm is to minimize such costs to the lowest minimum. The agriculture ministry will evidently be the government arm to ensuring that the GIS technology implementation in Toledo is a success. The stakeholders from the ministry will ideally be tasked with the policy making roles and creating the required legislative framework guidelines that will be required to localize the GIS technology. Some of the policy requirements for GIS will include the mapping and boundary demarcations within the Toledo district. Other policy approaches that can be initiated by the agriculture ministry will include finance and tax policies that will subsidize the initial costs of the software and hardware acquisitions that will drive the technology. GPS gadgets will need to be accessed at the lowest minimum charges. The local government, through the agriculture ministry can also be tasked with the responsibility of securing the GIS system and providing a location where the online based ArcGIS can be centered. For mobile deployment of the ArcGIS, the agriculture ministry can be trusted to liaise with the other concerned ministries to ensure that the requisite infrastructural support is in place including satellites and mobile masts for a consistent uninterrupted internet connectivity. Such expensive infrastructural outlays can only be undertaken by the Belize government but through the influence of the ministry of agriculture and the local government at Toledo. Since 1991, Sustainable Harvest International, headquartered in the southern districts of Stann Creek and Toledo has been responsible for developing sustainable and practical strategies to improve the physical state of the local environment. Until the advent of the current century, the pristine scrublands, rainforests and the coastal plains of the country remained unexplored. But since the turn of globalization that has come to characterize the leading decade of the century, cultural losses that have led to large scale environmental degradation have been the norm. The environment is under consistent threat due to slash and burn land tilling practices and large scale logging. Coastal developments have been on the rise. The same scenario plays out in the deforestation front. The discovery and eventual tapping of crude oil in the district has worsened the scenario further. The tropical rainforest which has been the primary catchment area that sustains the rain fed agricultural practices in the region has since been facing an eminent threat of extinction. If these scenario plays out to their full completion, then agricultural practices in the district will unarguably face a grim future. Already, Toledo District has been identified as one of the localities within Belize that has the highest number of an impoverished population. It is based on this understanding that SHI-Belize has set out to work with the locals to plan against such possibilities. GIS has become a necessary tool for resource and land management. SHI can deploy the GIS technology for agro-ecological zoning to ensure that the environment is conserved and utilized in a sustainable manner. In Toledo District, GIS can be used to conduct Environmental Impact Assessment especially to visualize the impact that the current land use will have on the immediate environment. Using the appropriate GIS tools, visual impacts of land use can be evaluated. For example the GIS system can be used to tell how much portion of the tropical forest has been encroached by the counterproductive slash and burn agricultural practices. A GIS system can also be used to conduct scoping surveys of environmental effects. Once the key data sets are made available, the GIS technology can provide accurate guidelines for environmental impact survey. A centralized structure can be developed by SHI to ensure that the survey guidelines are only issued by one entity. The NGO that will be responsible for training should also ensure that it develops qualified floodplain managers to ensure that the floods in Toledo are managed well and the risks of crop loss or infrastructural damage are greatly reduced. Skills such as the development of data layers in ArcGIS will be essential. Deployment of the ArcGIS Online system by the NGO will be less costly as they will not be required to purchase the ArcGIS server. This will significantly reduce the project cost for the nonprofit organization and such savings can always be used to initiate other projects in the different areas of the district. All that the users will require is access to the regions Google Maps. Although this has been rued as a cost advantage because it eliminates the cost of purchasing the ArcGIS server, the ArcGIS Explorer Online and the ArcGIS.com map viewer will only be effective if they are run on devices with high end interfaces which are not cheap either. The current imminent limitations faced by the district are very numerous but not insurmountable. They include the availability of digital data, the start-up costs, and system maintenance, the local availability of software and hardware and constructing the database. Currently, digital data about the region is scarce. Not even the World Banks seems to have complete and recent data sets on the area where the GIS system is to be implemented. Also the categorization of Belize as a developing country and the fact that the target district is categorized as one of the most affected by poverty in the country might make the associate startup costs for deploying a GIS system to sound immoral in the face of other urgent imminent challenges like widespread poverty due to high unemployment rates and disease. The positive side however remains that the GIS can also provide solutions to some of these problems. According to the United States Department of Labor, the Americas will experience a geospatial job growth rate of 13% to 18% in the decade between 2008 and 2018. The rate is bound to increase as a result of increased digital sharing among the various affordable mobile platforms that continue to be developed. Due to the relative low number of geospatial professions, a cross training approach will be the most suitable training model for Toledo District. Due to the prevalent unemployment in the district, cross training is most preferred since it entails the aspect of interchangeable human assets where in a given period a resident of the district can be engaged to perform certain geospatial duties and they will do it just as competitive as anyone else. This training method can be implemented by developing a basic GIS Certification program that can be offered right from the senior school level and within the farming community themselves. Works Cited Kennedy, Michael. Introducing Geographic Information Systems with Arcgis: A Workbook Approach to Learning Gis. , 2013. Print. Read More