PCARRD and the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) recently hosted an 11-day regional geo-spatial summit in MMSU, Batac, Ilocos Norte.
The summit aimed to strengthen the geographical information system (GIS) capacities of the Council’s regional partners. As well, it aimed to create a pool of GIS experts and programmers to propel geo-spatial technologies as high-end tools for the S&T agenda on climate change.
The summit’s theme is “Strengthening institutional capacities on geo-spatial technologies and information systems for climate change agenda”.
Participating in the summit were representatives from the local government of Batac City, Pangasinan State University, Don Mariano Marcos State University, Department of Environment and Natural Resources-Region 1, Isabela State University, and MMSU. The participants in the summit will be the GIS focal persons of their respective institutions and would comprise a network of GIS experts.
Interestingly, the summit is part of the GIS roadmap of the GIS expert from University of Illinois, Dr. Guillermo Mendoza. Mendoza, also a Balik Scientist awardee, discussed the use of commercial and open source GIS software.
Other speakers included MMSU R&D Director Nathaniel R. Alibuyog who presented the geo-information infrastructure framework. The framework is necessary in coming up with initial technological and organizational requirements/standards, certain policies, and relationships for the development of web GIS-based climate change information system. Open source web mapping and geo-server based systems were showcased to demonstrate the capabilities of the software in the Internet platform.
In addition to the summit’s pool of experts was University of the Philippines Los Baños-College of Forestry and Natural Resources’Dr. Nathaniel C. Bantayan. Bantayan presented case studies on establishment of forestry and natural resources spatial data infrastructure and mainstreaming GIS through the web. The GIS infrastructure is envisioned for use in a national scope.
Meanwhile, initial development and implementation of the web-based GIS will be pilot tested in Region 1 with MMSU as the lead agency; and will be integrated to Ilocos Agriculture and Resources Research and Development Consortium's climate change program agenda.