UNIGIS Students Thesis Work on Galapagos

The GeoCommunity Galapagos is happy to present three extraordinary Master Thesis on pressing issues related to GIS-based spatial planning that help to better understand the needs for a sustainable and integrative management of the Islands. The students graduated from the UNIGIS Distance Learning Program in Latin America that supports our initiative with capacity building at different professoinal and academic levels.

MSc Darlyn Alejandra Valdés Uribe:
Agroecological Zoning of Coffee Crops in Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos - Ecuador

MSc Maja Celinšćak:
Identifying conservation priorities for terrestrial ecosystems in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

MSc Carolina Sampedro
Comparison of three image classification approaches for land use and land cover (LULC) identification

GeoComunidad Galapagos supported through the GSDI Associate Small Grants Program

Since its launch in 2003, the GSDI Association Small Grants Program has provided support to more than 110 projects across the globe. The small grant approach was viewed as a way to incentivise partners to create and implement solutions for decision-makers. The grants enable a wide range of stakeholders and instil greater stewardship and capacity to manage information resources.

The GeoComunidad Galapagos iniative was awarded a USD 2500 grant for designing and constructing the community-based SDI GeoCommunity Galapagos. This economic support was essential to complete the preliminary work for setting up the Community SDI Galapagos in a series of hands-on workshops with local partners at Galapagos defining:

• the conceptual framework of the SDI
• system architecture and design, and
• flagship projects such as easy-to-handle (GI-)tools to monitor invasive species, urban sprawl, waste management and tourism project, just to name some examples.

Please feel free to study the Final Report to get to know more about results and ideas for future work!