Amazonia Biodiversity Estimation
using
Remote Sensing
and
Indigenous Taxonomy
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SISTEM (GIS)
We are using GRASS a free software GIS application running under LINUX and originally developed by USACERL the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. GRASS intended users are regional land planners, ecologists, geographers. It is ideal for managing parks and forests and generally large areas. Is not suited to modeling of traffic, electrical, water and sewage infrastructure or for precise positioning of urban structures.
GRASS is distributed under GNU licence (Free Software Foundation) It is maintained and developed by programmers world wide and has a large number of users. Complete source code is provided allowing modifications of the programs to fulfill special needs .
We hope to involve the GRASS programming community in the design of a local community friendly interface to the GIS and the Grass users community in helping preparing the maps and processing the data.
GRASS has the standard capabilities of GIS (vector, raster, principal component analysis, clustering, rectification, registration,pixel algebra, etc)
The GIS will have the following components: On-site workstation, off-site workstations, web server and web client.
The on-site work station will have, full GRASS, off-site pre-reprocessed GIS data and local community friendly interface to GIS. The web client component of the GIS , implemented in Java should be on-line before 2001. It will allow zoom and xy panning in real time by predicting and fetching ahead of time tiles of the image. The client side can aloso perform as java applets mapcalc , text printing, raster overlay etc.
The GIS will be an invaluable tool for the scientists coming to do research in the Xixuaú. The data collected, precisely localised in time and space and inserted in the GIS, will be made available to the global scientific community.
Below is given the current implementation of the GIS
0° North - 2° South 61° West 62 West (110 Km * 220 Km )
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IBGE Amazonia Legal 1:3.000.000
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IBGE Roraima 1:1000.0000
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IBGE Manaus 1:1000.0000
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IBGE BARCELOS 1:250.000
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IBGE MOURA 1:250.000
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IBGE ALALAU 1:250.000
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IBGE CURARAU 1:250.000
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IBGE RADAR MOSAIC 1.250.000
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LEVANTAMENTO PLANIMETRICO Xixuaú 1:50.000
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Digital Chart of the World DCW 1:1.000.000
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GTO030 - Elevation Map (1Km resolution)
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HYDRO1K
The Elevation map was obtained by digitizing from the IBGE 1:250.0000 topographic maps elevations and contours and then running the GRASS program r.surf.contour.
Another elevation map was otained from GTO030 with the GRASS program r.surf.tps
Successively we will obtain a better DEM with the help of SAR Interferometry [26].
Elevation maps are needed to perform terrain corrections of both SAR and multi-spectral satellite imagery and to produce 3-D maps .