About 24 representatives from the various divisions of the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development Staff (PCSDS), as well as from the local Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) office attended the Basic Geographic Information System (GIS) on August 18-19 at the conference room of the PCSD Building, Bgy Sta. Monica, Puerto Princesa City.
The goal of the training was to develop the map making skills of the representatives from each division. This would allow each division to increase the speed of producing any kind of output which require geographical information and presentation, reducing the burden placed on the GIS division of PCSD.
The training focused on the usage of the open source program Quantum GIS (QGIS)to create geographical maps using templates and data obtained from primary and secondary sources.
There were nine exercises vital in creating a comprehensive map of any kind. The first half being done on the first day of training, and the last half being completed on the second day.
The first half covered Geo-referencing, Creating Vectors/ Digitizing, Google Earth Operations, Interpolation, and Clipping/ Filtering. The second half covered Masking Rasters, Buffering, Intersecting, Attribute Table Operations, and Map Layout.
The invited speakers were: Forester Arnan B. Apaza, Spatial Modeler of World Bank, and Hydrologist Brando Angeles and GIS Specialist Niel Varcas, both from the Laguna Lake Development Authority.
At the end of the training, each participant was required to create a map of the land cover of Palawan based on data obtained in 2014.
Although there were initially some problems in using the program, all participants were successful in creating the map.