Environmental Impact and Risk
Use of GIS
At the present time, environmental impact studies and many other areas of knowledge require ever better tools that allow us to make the right decisions. Geographic information systems (GIS) are a tool that lets us:
- Handle databases that contain not only the information about our projects, but also the geographical (geo-referenced) information about the data and the place where a project is being implemented with the advantages that this implies: an information base that describes a project in geographic terms and the possibility of making models to facilitate decision-making.
- Visualizing information and the result of an analysis or a project in the form of maps.
- Models: GIS are also a tool for analyzing, transforming and generating new geographical information about a project.
The employment of GIS in the field requires the use of a global positioning system (GPS), which allows us to use geodesic coordinates for future reference rather than a system of arbitrary coordinates.
The use of GIS in every project gives every industry, every government agency and every small business an advantage in making savings, planning, visualizing information and doing much more than just managing information, since GIS is also a tool for interpreting said information.
Environmental Management and GIS
Within the area of the management of natural resources, environmental impact and conservation, it is critical to have precise information about a landscape in order to make decisions about what should be protected and how to do so. GIS is a very useful tool that provide us with a better understanding of how the elements of natural communities interact with each other over an entire landscape. Some of the potential applications of GIS in this field are:
Water: Planning and mapping of habitats, wetlands, water quality, watersheds, uses of riverside land and the natural features of an existing habitat.
Soil: Digital maps of a particular site can be linked to a database that has information about topography, basic information about the site, aerial photographs that give a spatial illustration of the natural features of the area, identifying the proprietors of the land with which there is an interaction and assessing projects according to established priorities and criteria.
Origins and history
The GPS or global positioning system consists of the NAVSTAR network of 24 satellites belonging to the Department of Defense of the United States of America. These satellites are continuously sending positioning signals and a GPS receiver uses these signals to be able to determine its position by triangulation, with a precision, in the case of GPS that have WAAS technology, of up to 5 meters, depending on the geometry of the satellites at that moment.
Fauna: GIS are an important tool for the protection and management of habitat and species, making it possible to study populations of animals of different sizes, as well as being a tool for studying the ecological corridors, patterns of migration and the influence that parks, reserves, sanctuaries and other projects have on wildlife.
Vegetation: GIS are ideal for drawing maps and making inventories of vegetation over the entire landscape and achieving a better understanding of the inventories of endangered species.
Hydrogeology
In this field, GIS are an aid in the design of strategies for the characterization of contaminated sites and their remediation.
CAM makes use of GIS in its planning of the location of monitoring wells, sampling points, etc., thus avoiding the unnecessary expenses and waste incurred by poor planning and/or location of wells. Moreover, the results of the analyses of the samples and the data from every well can be stored in the GIS created for a specific project thus enabling a better control of all the parameters. The geographic database can then also be linked to the maps and any other information that has been collected.
The applications of Geographic Information Systems is only limited by the imagination of those who use them.
