PROCESSING CONSERVATION INDICATORS WITH OPEN SOURCE TOOLS: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE DIGITAL OBSERVATORY FOR PROTECTED AREAS

Lucy Bastin, Andrea Mandrici, Luca Battistella, Grégoire Dubois

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

The European Commission has a commitment to open data and the support of open source software and standards. We present lessons learnt while populating and supporting the web and map services that underly the Joint Research Centre's Digital Observatory for Protected Areas. Challenges include: large datasets with highly complex geometries; topological inconsistencies, compounded by reprojection for equal-area calculations; multiple different representations of the same geographical entities, for example coastlines; licensing requirement to continuously update indicators to respond to monthly changes in the authoritative data. In order to compute and publish an array of indicators, we used a range of open source tools including GRASS, R, python, GDAL, PostGIS, geometry libraries for Hadoop, Geoserver, Geonode, and Mapserver. In addition we assessed the value of the commercial ArcGIS Pro software and the Google Earth Engine platform.
We describe the lessons that we learnt in building and documenting a usable and repeatable workflow,highlighting weak spots and workarounds., Code for our processing workflows will be shared via github and key process flows will be shared via a VRE to allow reproducible research while complying with data redistribution restrictions from the data providers. Our final goal is to move the entire processing chain to open source tools and share it as a versioned resource.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFOSS4G 2017 Conference Proceedings
Subtitle of host publicationFree and Open Source for GEO - peer-reviewed conference papers, volume 17. Boston, USA, 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Sept 2017
Event2017 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference - Boston, United States
Duration: 14 Aug 201719 Aug 2017

Conference

Conference2017 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period14/08/1719/08/17

Bibliographical note

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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