0261-B1
Cesario G. Umali, PhD 1 , Angelito B. Exconde, MSc 2
Remote sensing (RS) and geographic information systems (GIS) are western technologies initially used to observe and monitor the earth for warfare and colonization of new and promising lands. Civilian uses of such technologies have however emerged for national and international development. Before the advent of space platforms and digital cameras, aerial photography and manual photo interpretation were the methods used in remote sensing of the earth. Nowadays, however, with the advent of powerful spacecrafts, imaging systems, and computer hardware and software, RS and GIS have greatly advanced and continued to advance in the developed world. The case is not so, however, in the Philippines where research and development time, efforts and funds are prioritized for and hence mainly directed to the alleviation of so much poverty in the countryside. Remote sensing and GIS activities in the country are largely uncoordinated. As such, agencies concerned with land use planning, like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), the Department of Agriculture (DA), the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) and others have hardly made any dent in putting up permanent forest boundaries as mandated for in the 1987 Philippine Constitution. Local manpower and expertise in RS and GIS are not enough. A few foreign trained experts are however wasted due to misplacement, lack of coordination and the paucity of equipment and paraphernalia needed in RS and GIS. Even so, some highly sophisticated remote sensing and GIS hardware and software are available in some of these agencies but they are only minimally used for the intended purposes for which they have been acquired. Some recommendations to alleviate said problems are presented in the paper.
Remote sensing (RS) is basically a western invention initially used by the military in the discovery and colonization of remote and promising lands. Platform employed was the airplane using the conventional aerial camera as the remote sensor. Geographic information systems (GIS) is also a western invention that is used to store, display, analyze and map information about the earth using a computer hardware-software system. More recently, the US military also invented the so-called global positioning system (GPS) for precise monitoring of friendly and/or enemy positions and/or troop movements.
With the advent of space shuttles and satellites together with the use of more powerful sensors beyond the photographic window, satellite RS, GIS and GPS have become more involved and extended for civilian purposes. These include mapping for land use, vegetation, climate, global change detection and monitoring, crop growth and yield inventory and monitoring, and many other aspects of biophysical and socioeconomic geography. Yasuda (2002) states that GPS is now commercially available worldwide "for a wide variety of purposes such as construction, surveying and car navigation."
The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the problems we have encountered in our attempts to employ remote sensing and GIS in our work as researchers and development workers in government. Based on this experience, we will give some recommendations to alleviate if not totally minimize the said problems. We hope that present and future users of the technology shall be least affected by such problems so that mapping of our land and the resources found therein can be done more efficiently for the betterment of the Filipino nation.
In the least developed countries of the world like the Philippines, research and development efforts are mainly directed to the alleviation of so much poverty in the countryside. Funds are prioritized for the production of elementary needs - for the production of basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter, to combat disease and malnutrition, and to produce the cash needed to pay for the servicing of both local and international debts. This is why when research and development project proposals involve remote sensing and GIS, chances of approval by higher authorities are nil. The common belief is that RS and GIS are only indirect tools that maybe dispensed with in attaining efficient agricultural and forest production.
Remote sensing and GIS activities in the country are largely uncoordinated. As a result, agencies concerned with land use planning, like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), the Department of Agriculture (DA), the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) and others have only very minimal sharing of remote sensing and GIS data. This, probably, is one of the reasons why we have hardly made any dent in putting up permanent boundaries to delineate forests from non-forest and other land use cover as mandated for in the 1987 Philippines Constitution.
The Image 100 Analyzer and the computer compatible tapes (CCTs) containing remote sensing data procured by the DENR during the late 70s did not even help. The same is true with the Master Plan for Forestry Development (DENR 1990) that contains land use data obtained by a German-assisted study and a World Bank-financed study of the Swedish Space Corporation using SPOT imagery and GIS.
This does not however mean that people who man these agencies do not know coordination work. The problem results probably due to the frequent turnover of administration with corresponding change in work priorities thereby resulting to work stoppage in some relevant and vital government projects. Moreover, this constitutional provision, although attainable, seems to be unecological aside from impractical. This is because land use and/or land cover of any country should be a dynamic property that must allow for readjustments as dictated by the socioeconomic and ecological needs of the population. To set this property permanently without any future adjustment would be unthinkable in a developing country whose population increases at a galloping rate of about 3% annually.
Local manpower and expertise in RS and GIS are not enough. This is partly due to the fact that we have very few earth science schools that offer geography, photogrammetry, remote sensing and GIS courses. In our country, these courses are not considered glamorous. Only few students are attracted to take these disciplines.
And so, while surveying the issues of geomatics education, Georgiadou and Groot (2002) state: "In developing countries where weak organizations are struggling for survival within an institutional vacuum as regards the ICT world, the availability of skilled human resources is not enough."
At the University of the Philippines Los Banos, however, there exists an Environmental Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Lab (Bantayan et al. 1999) which consists of a HP70c plotter, a 60"x48" Calcomp digitizing tablet, two high-end workstations, AutoCAD MAP from Autodesk and SAGE GIS software. This is a modest implementation used principally for academic purposes. Even so, the presence of this lab is so insignificant in the promotion of remote sensing and GIS in our country.
At the University of the Philippines Diliman, we are aware of the existence of the Institute of Photogrammetry and Geodesy at the College of Engineering since, if we are not mistaken, the 60's. But to delegate the whole responsibility of educating Filipinos on remote sensing and GIS mainly to this institute would surely not be enough. Other institutions would be required in the propagation of RS and GIS technology in our country.
In response to this, the Department of Soil Science, UPLB now offers GIS courses in relation to the mapping of soil resources in the country (Paningbatan 2002, pers. comm.). There, also, are some fortunate individuals who from time to time return from abroad with a good training on remote sensing and GIS. On returning, however, the training of these foreign trained experts are only wasted due to misplacement, lack of coordination and the paucity of equipment and paraphernalia needed in RS and GIS.
Misplacements are partly caused by promotion of the newly trained expert to an administrative position where that expert has no training at all. In other cases, dislocation of expertise results from the reshuffling of personnel on account of political differences and/or ethnic grouping. In any case, the result is wasted training and underutilization of sophisticated remote sensing and GIS hardware and software in key government offices tasked with the mapping of natural and environmental resources in the country. Further, this results to an irrecoverable loss of time and money at the expense of government.
Mapping of soil resources is one of the many areas where remote sensing and GIS are used. The hardware and software employed are however too much business-driven (Zinck 1990). In a 2000 survey of earth observation data pricing policy, Harris (2000) found that for Carterra geo products the price per km 2 ranges from US$29-44 at a minimum order price of US$2000. Local data, aerial photographs for example, are generally not available. Moreover, "the equipment and programs become obsolete over a short period of time. Restricted budget allocations do not allow adjustment to the speed of technological innovations. As a consequence, users frequently adopt a waiting position before jumping into or being swallowed by the technology spiral" (Zinck 1990). This then results to the paucity of RS and GIS paraphernalia mentioned earlier.
Being business-driven is not altogether bad. For vendors, this is a boon. But for users like us, this is something like a scourge. Recall that remote sensing, as we have said in the introductory, is a western invention. When we employ this technology, we become hostage to the buying of the array of hardware and software requirements available only from western inventors. The same is true with RS data. Our country neither owns nor operates any space platform for the remote observation of the earth. We neither fabricate stereoscopes nor manufacture grease pencils commonly used in conventional airphoto interpretation. In short we must import everything we need for us to be able to use remote sensing and GIS. This will further aggravate trade imbalance in favor of the inventor to the great disadvantage of the user.
This problem, by the way, is not confined in the remote sensing and GIS field alone. In general, this problem extends to our western type of education in which the methodologies would mostly require us to buy the products of the developed nations of the West. In remote sensing and GIS, India has tried to solve this problem by having their own satellite, the so-called IRS. As for our country, we know there were some attempts to launch some sort of a spacecraft by the name of - was it AGILA? - but well, we don't know what exactly happened.
And so, in a published communication Beek and Paresi (1998) have noted this problem by asking "whether the information society using the information superhighway in cyberspace can be able to contribute in making a better world or on the contrary shall only increase injustice, imbalance, exclusion and marginalization among and within societies." These authors were apprehensive that "information slums and ghettos shall only disgrace the so-called global village." We have felt the pinch of this Beek and Paresi apprehension since long aqo.
To alleviate this problem a bit, our government must then employ capacity building - defined by Georgiadou and Groot (2002) as the process of improving the "ability of organizations to perform agreed tasks, either singly or in cooperation with other organizations." According to these authors, it has been the general consensus of the scientific community that governments must have the obligation to allow "unrestricted and efficient access to timely and up-to-date fundamental geoinformation" including the "obligation to facilitate access and promote the broadest possible application of fundamental geoinformation by the introduction, amongst other measures, of well-considered pricing policies." This, it seems to us, is empowerment very badly needed by remote sensing and GIS users like us in the grassroots level.
This then brings us to the so-called Geospatial Data Infrastructures (GDI), alternatively called National Spatial Data Infrastucture (NSDI) (Harvey 2001) or Geographic Information Infrastructure (GII) whose purposes include: 1) to save time, effort and funds in accessing spatial data and using it responsibly and 2) to avoid unnecessary duplication in the harmonization and standardization of required datasets by promoting the sharing of available data (Groot 1997).
According to Lemens (2001) "geo-data plays a key role in our increasingly information-intensive, networked society." Much of these data, Lemmens (2001) states, "is scattered across a diversity of public agencies for reasons of efficiency and proper practice," According to the same author, these reasons may be justified in the past but are now anachronistic and only serve as a formidable stumbling blocks to geo-data use and their exploitation. In short, geo-data must be shared through the GDI. It is probably because of this that "geographers, surveyors, cartographers and related professionals all over the world have embarked on projects to design and build GII" (Harvey 2001).
Groot (1997) interestingly noted that one of the first geoinformation infrastructures in operation was the Canadian Oil and Gas GIS (CanOGGIS). According to Groot (1997), exploration geologists and geophysicists in a number of oil and gas companies in western Canada spent 60% of their time searching for geoinformation and only 20% of their time doing something useful with it. They then decided to create CanOGGIS to help them know what information is where, who owns it, how and at what conditions it can be used, and at what price. After three years of operation, CanOGGIS reduced information access cost by a factor of 10 (Groot 1997).
Most recently, we have come to understand that since 1996 there has been a move by the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA) to establish a NGII (IATFGI, 2001). We support this NAMRIA move very vigorously.
We have indicated above that remote sensing and GIS originated in the western world for warfare and colonization purposes but have since been used extensively for civilian purposes. Some of the problems on the use of remote sensing and GIS based on our limited experience as grassroots researchers in this country are summarized as follows:
We have also indicated that because of the imported technology, we must also import the hardware and software if we have to apply the technology locally thus aggravating further the trade imbalance in favor of the technology source. It is at this point that we can sadly conclude that we shall only become perennial hostage to the importation of the hardware and software required in the use of this technological innovation if we do not develop our own.
To alleviate our problems a bit, we have mentioned about the geospatial data infrastructure (GDI) with two main objectives, namely: 1) to save time, effort and funds in accessing spatial data and using it responsibly and 2) to avoid unnecessary duplication in the harmonization and standardization of required datasets by promoting the sharing of available data (Groot 1997). We took note of the advantages of the GDI as propounded by authorities.
And so, we come to this august body to plea for help so that we can establish a national spatial data infrustructure. The Landscape Science Society of the Philippines (LSSP), Inc., established and registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) just a year ago, would like to spearhead this undertaking.
Another plea that we would like to make is for this august body to help us locate a benevolent organization that can fund for us some kind of training on GIS software development. We cannot forever depend on software importation. We must develop our own.
All this reflects our limited experience and opinions. Others might feel different about these issues, had applied remote sensing and GIS successfully, and had different experiences. For this, we will appreciate any help and feedback.
1 Supervising Science Research Specialist (Retired)
Ecosystems Research and Development Bureau (ERDB)
College, Laguna 4031, Philippines
http://www.geocities.com/cg_umali
emails: [email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
2 Senior Science Research Specialist
Ecosystems Research and Development Bureau (ERDB)
College, Laguna 4031, Philippines
Email: [email protected]