Geographic Information Systems in Mine Action

A land-mine is a perfect soldier: "Ever courageous, never sleeps, never misses.“

--- Khmer Rouge - Cambodia

Authored ByLACROIX, Pierre Marcel Anselme

University of Geneva&

Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining

Journal for ERW & Mine Action

What is this paper

General paper, try to propose GIS for mine action Discusses the advantage and Capability of GIS for Mine

action Primitive idea based on existing GIS feature and mine action

requirement

Discusses GIS tools , 3D terrain analysis and its effect in humanitarian operation

Content

Landmine and Uxexploded ordnance Challenges in Landmine- Present scenario Introduction of GIS Landmine application GIS Use in Mine action Current data System – IMSMA Mine Action Decision Making GIS maps Connecting GIS with IMSMA 3D Analysis Afghanistan Case study Analyzing the Accessibility Prioritizing Activities and Evaluating cost

Introduction of GIS Landmine application

Effective Decision making in mine action Geographic factor Population distribution Infrastructure Terrain Vegetation

Application of GIS in landmine action Integrating mine data with

Terrain, soil, vegetation, land use data Social economic data

Integrating Environmental + Socio Economic + Cultural Specificity of mine affected areas

Decision and priority management of demining authority

GIS Use in Mine action

Generate intuitive map at various scale For operator in field Country level governance International regulation body

3D analysis of spatial data Improve prioritisation and planning of field

operations Help to model the nominal operational difficulty of

demining Determine suitable assets for a given task

Current data System - IMSMA

Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) have developed the system

IMSMA- Information Management System for Mine Action (Information management system – 1999) Combines RDMS with GIS

It contains maps of different scale (country structure, local structure) Landmine affected areas represented in polygon, each polygon has its

own item table, which contain information on mine Its has theme based tool bar on map (as points in polygon)

Location Hazard Accident Associated place of the country structure

IMSMA- Lags in advanced tools and not using the full potential of GIS

IMSMA – Screen View

Mine Action Decision Making

Information needs to be integrated with geospatial component Factors influencing main action decision making

The geographic location of hazards and their type Historical information about hazardous areas Marking in the field The type of mine risk education provided or yet to be provided The location of populations, internally displaced persons and returnees The location of the working teams Local terrain conditions Weather conditions Accessibility, eg, information about infrastructure, traffic, security Logistical constraints The assets deployed in an area and tasks carried out.

GIS maps

Many maps were created to help on demining activity and observing the progress , planning Large-scale hazardous area location maps

Contamination density maps

Map information extraction

Required area maps layer (e.g. hazardous area map) overlaid on top of many other layers Topography

Urban Areas

Critical Infrastructure

Land Cover & Land use changes

Development & Populated areas

Base map

Slopes, roads

Meteorological condition

Current position of the team

Large scale hazardous map (CHA/SHA)

Representing every hazardous area by a Polygon (delimited boundary) and point symbol marker

This Large scale map (e.g. Village map) laid on different layer

Example – Hazardous area polygon overlaid on satellite image of the area Represent village built-up in the mine cleared areas

Map up-dation have to be done at least on a weekly basis

Updating Geospatial information Involves recording attributes

Types of hazard

Status of the hazard

Co-ordinate information

Information represented on the map Symbol sized proportational to the observed

observed items

Different symbol or color used for each types

Contamination density Map

Aggregate information on hazardous map (indicating all Hazards) become un readable due to large data (in small scale maps)

Need for single data, statisfy the requirement

A density value is assigned for each location of map depended on number of Hazards found within a distance

GIS Density interpolator tool used to compute the density

Uses of Contamination density map Shows variation of landmine contamination

Setting the priorityAfghanistan data

Core data mapDensity data map

Choropleth Map

Information map on each administrative unit

ERW areas are aggregated by administrative unit and coloured according to the contamination, optionally normalised by the area of each unit

The below figure set the correct priority We see both high contamination + Population at Risk

Connecting GIS with IMSMA

IMSMA contains important updated attribute information

Need a connection between GIS and IMSMA GICHD developed START - Simplified Toolbar to

Accelerate Repeated Tasks START

ArcGIS plug-in used to quickly extract the IMSMA data for GIS analysis

Help to convert EXCEL and GPS date into geo-spatial information Help in production of maps

3D Analysis

GIS can create 3D surface(X,Y,Z(elevation)) Importance of 3D analysis

increase the accuracy of area size calculations of contaminated surfaces; More realistic assessment of the operational difficulty of demining by integrating slope

and elevation information into the analysis Better prepare field operations Determine the potential location of mines that may have moved over time through

water run-off or surface movement Report on demining activities in a more visually intuitive manner.

A major advantage of 3D GIS is accuracy of surface area calculations Actual terrain is taken into account (instead of flat projected surface) 25% slope , projected area 3% less than actual area Reduce the reporting error of contamination

Slope Ate of change of elevation in a adjacent location

Afghanistan

Slope date from SRTM (Shuttle radar topography mission) DEM

Combining slope dataset with contamination data

Gives information reg- operational difficulty of demining Transportation Machine

Hill shade function along with slope and elevation image improves the visualization of the surface for analysis (enhance marking and fencing)

Ref- Digital elevation model on Afghanistan and derived slope and hillshade.| Data source: Jarvis et al. (2008)

3D terrain contamination Visualization

Visualizing study area in 3D give lot of inference than 2d Planimetric data

3D GIS analysis implemented by Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan (MACCA ) for slope analysis

3d Analysis - Hydrology

Hydrology and watershed modeling

Hydrological network can be derived from DEM Gives flow length , downstream and upstream This gives information of possible displaced mines

Dislocated mines are always difficult to detect

3D Analysis -Telecommunication

To address telecommunication issues in the field

View shed analysis

Identify optimal satellite receptor

VHF repeater locations.

Predict strength of GPS signals

Help in organising overflight operations with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and airplane observations (eg, for large-scale mapping purposes)

Very high frequency (VHF ) coverage

Brown cells are covered by at least one red observation point

Yellow cells are located in radio shadow areas

Analyzing the Accessibility

GIS based Road network analysis Take into account slope, land cover and road quality

GIS based Transport network analysis Dispatching medical care to victims Determination of the best location for building a new health facility Planning of in-field operations Road clearance management and prioritisation humanitarian logistics to locate new warehousing facilities

Minimize the travel time and distance in the mined area

Identify nearest medical facility (based on accessibility & cost)

Prioritizing Activities and Evaluating cost

GIS advantage lies in its capacity to combine various data sources to generate new information

IMSMA data combines with Non IMSMA data

Combining many data GIS can Help

Prioritise hazard clearance based on any number of criteria

Determine how much time and effort clearance of a particular hazardous area would take, by integrating local terrain and infrastructure conditions

Decide which type of asset should be deployed by comparing different scenarios based on different asset characteristics under similar terrain conditions

Have better knowledge of the accessibility of a planned hazardous area and knowledge of local terrain conditions for planning future tasks.

Prioritizing to Decision making

Attribute based score allotted to each area to define its priority

GIS capability offers us to prioritize demining based on

Socio-Economic impact analysis of landmine hazards Range Munitions Resources and facilities Blocked Number of recent victim

Close proximity to infrastructure of interest (e.g. hospital), road, Industry

The resultant scoring from the process by GIS can be fed to Decision making and priority setting

Operational difficulty of demining

Visualizing the clearance difficulty due to Terrain Vegetation & Ground softness Precipitation & Temperature Pathway width

Future development

Focus on sharing the geospatial information through web application

Geoportal