Livelihoods and Landscapes

Geospatial applications for climate-smart landscape management

Using a collaborative information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) process, we are developing open-source applications to map diverse landscapes and seascapes.

This project is funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and is a collaboration between stakeholders in Fiji, Tonga, Australia, and New Zealand.

Research

In Pacific Island Countries, the environmental resources that support livelihoods are distributed across landscapes in a mix of spatial patterns. Capturing this spatial detail in landscape use is important to inform landscape management that is sensitive to these livelihood dependencies.

This research is using a collaborative software development methodology (ICT4D) to:

• develop a workflow and geospatial apps to map and monitor landscapes.
• build the capacity of landscape stakeholders to use GIS and geospatial data for landscape management.

maplandscape: an open-source workflow to map diverse landscaes

maplandscape is a workflow of open-source mobile, cloud, and desktop geospatial apps for mapping landscapes.

It provides tools for collecting geospatial data in the field using mobile devices, cloud-based data management and storage, and access to a range of geospatial analysis and visualisation functions through a web browser.

Together, these apps support monitoring a diverse range of landscapes and make it easy to generate insights from geospatial data to guide landscape management.

The functionality of the maplandscape workflow was co-designed with stakeholders in Tonga and Fiji to meet landscape monitoring and decision-making needs.

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