Category Archives: countries

Coastlines fascinate

Seems like I am pulled to the coastlines. Seems like I am not alone. People tend to gravitate towards food resources, and where the ocean meets land, and even rivers, food has always been plenty. Trade too. And the boats of course.

I have a house, in the northern parts of Norway where the shoreline is but 200 meters away. From where I live in Trondheim I can see the fjord. The ocean has  always been around.

I am one of those with fond memories of small waves, a grandfather safely steering the boat, and days blessed with sun and fishing. When the weather was less than fair we stayed in or near my grandparents house enjoying our small adventures around the old farm.

Seems also that the places I travel to these days are close to the ocean. Zanzibar is one of these fantastic places where oportunities and challenges arise practically on the shoreline. Mapping those oportunities and challenges is part of what I do. It invoves drones, big databases, partners in many institutions, researchers and more. Sometimes it comes together in a map describing the sensitivities of a coastal area. I like the thought of it, but fear that we more often than not do not have enough knowledge to present detailed enough maps.

In September we took some time off from our QGIS workshop to play around with the EPA drone. Great fun in the tennis court.

Ghana is an other of those places. My stays are usually in Accra, and although the coastline is

never far away it is merely the frame of the ocean and not much more. Inaccessible because of restricted daytime for me, the workshop participant and meetings participant. Workshops outside Accra usually end up being in Sogakope, a 60 minute drive down to Keta. But my meetings usually revolve on issues related to the ocean and its shoreline.

What’s with the coastal areas then? Here are some of the processes I am involved in:

  • Environmental atlases
  • Coastal sensitivity analysis for emergency response
  • Digitalization of drone data in coastal areas (coastline/mangrove/substrate)
  • Methods development of sensitivity assessments (both coastal and terrestrial)

I have attached a video from a recent (September 2017) trip to the Keta Lagoon area in Ghana. On a small strip of land between the Keta Lagoon and the coastline thousands of people live their lifes. The inland areas which are not flooded (remember this is a lagoon) are occasionaly flooded rendering the areas uninhabitable for parts of they year.

In the video you can see the sand traps designed to “harvest”sand so that the thin strip does not erode. You can see this as big dumps of stone perpendicular to the shoreline.

Apart from letting us see some of the areas near the coast the video also shows some highlights form a QGIS training near Sogakope.

Wilderness 3a: The Bulgaria analysis

I visited Bulgaria in December 2014. Based on discussions with BBF while contributing to their GIS training I decided to do a national wilderness analysis for Bulgaria. The Bulgaria analysis was done using OpenStreetMap data.

The above map is based on publicly available vector data from the OpenStreetMap-project covering Bulgaria. A wilderness analysis based on insufficient data will only represent a map of more or less mapped areas. In this case the basis for the analysis is decent. There will still be many errors.

The analysis has not in any way been sanctioned by Bulgarian authorities. But then again, why should it be? A map like this could be made by anyone having access to encroachment data and the tools to do the analysis.

The criteria used to map the wilderness areas based on OpenStreetMap in Bulgaria is as follows:

  • Roads: primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, motorway, trunk
  • Land use: industrial, reservoir, military, farmland, residential, orchard, commercial, quarry, farmland and salt_pond
  • Railways
  • Waterways: canal

The choice of data representing encroachments is highly subjective. A Bulgarian might have a completely different view of what qualifies as encroachment. And based on this one might establish a constructive dialogue on land use issues.

American mink – alien species proliferation analysis

Procedure overview for the analysis

Procedure overview for the analysis

The aim of this posting is to document the more technical aspects of establishing the knowledge basis necessary to follow up the action plan against american mink (nevison vison) – an alien species in the Norwegian fauna. It will show how the Python programming language and relevant programming libraries (ArcPy and others) are used in an analysis aiming to understand where the mink can spread under given circumstances.

The motivation for this is to document the process for other relevant projects as well as to make relevant code and methodological descriptions available for other persons/institutions involved in similar projects. The work has been made possible with access to other freely available information online and as such this posting should be considered a timely way of paying back for “services provided”. Continue reading