The advancement of GIS technologies in water management continues to grow rapidly with the inclusion of remote sensing, desktop GIS, and Internet-based mapping. Planners and decision-makers are gaining the opportunities to become fully immersed in the analysis of spatial data.
Water resource engineering is the discipline of engineering concerned with planning, management, and development of water resources.
A water resource system is a set of various diverse and complex but extensively interrelated subsystems that play a vital role in the management of water resources. The match of supply and demand of water is of utmost importance in the modern urban-centric society.
Further, the time and amount should also be managed well for proper allocation of this precious resource.
The success of our modern infrastructure depends on natural and human water delivery systems. Large amounts of time and effort are invested in learning more about the spatial and temporal patterns and characteristics of individual hydrologic processes so that we can anticipate, manage, and modify system behaviour to sustain modern lifestyles and prevent shortages (droughts), surpluses (floods), and resource impairment (pollution).
Population growth, point source pollution, soil degradation, food supply and energy are issues of great concern and are linked to the supply of water. A thorough understanding of the fundamental physical, biological, economic, and social processes and their complex integration is a must within watersheds.
For example, the National Research Council recently identified five sets of improvements to develop management of water resources.
1. Increased knowledge of the linkages among watershed components (rivers, wetlands, groundwater, uplands).
2. Increased understanding of the feedbacks from processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales.
3. Increased availability of inexpensive, useful indicators of watershed conditions and quantitative methods for evaluating land use and watershed management practices.
4. Increased availability of advanced watershed simulation models that are useful to and can be operated by managers who are not scientific experts.
5. Increased understanding of the risk and uncertainty in the decision- making process.
Geographic information system has influenced the development and implementation of hydrologic models at several different levels. The examples that follow also illustrate how GIS has been used to address water supply, water quality, and storm water management problems in several different contexts.
First and foremost, GIS has provided new opportunities to develop and efficiently run fully distributed models. These models take into account and predict the values of studied phenomena at any point within the watershed (Julien, Saghafian, and Ogden 1995; Mitas and Mitasova 1998; Mitasova, Hofierka, Zlocha, et al. 1996; Vieux 1991; Vieux, Farajalla, and Gaur 1996). This is very important from the point of view of management as it allows users, for example, to identify the location of possible sources of pollution.
Water resource decision support systems have drawn much effort globally. Some of these systems are aimed at research applications, and others are designed to support specific watershed management goals. However, there are some instant challenges in the collaboration of technology enhancements with water resource domain, which are as follows.
• To extend practical GIS-based methods for specific water resource challenges and problems.
• To recognize the methods for application of GIS to facilitate more effective and/or more efficient water resource management.
• Water resource application based on GIS is essential as training components for future water resource scientists, engineers, and policymakers for sustainable development.
The global challenge to manage water resources needs innovative technology to cope with the problem of scarce resource. The asymmetry between the limited supply of fresh water and the ever-increasing demand for water is of great concern for the planners of tomorrow.
The traditional unplanned and unscientific approach will lead to a grave water scarcity for future generations. Hence, better well-informed plans for tomorrow are certainly of utmost importance.
EXAMPLE OF GIS APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT WITH OPEN SOURCE
School-GIS Proposal: Environmental Education Kit for Schools
The mission statement of School-GIS is to provide “advanced GIS solutions for environmental education to a wide range of stakeholders like students, teachers, ecologists, environmentalists, and different government and non-government agencies”. Schools have an important responsibility to introduce environmental education. Thanks to the public interest litigation filed in the Supreme Court by environmentalist Mehta, and repeated orders and insistence of the Supreme Court, many state governments have introduced environmental education in schools.
However, framing the curriculum and effective teaching pose a problem, among other things, due to the complexity of the multidisciplinary subject with several layers of information and knowledge. GIS can be an important tool for visualizing the environment in relevant layers. The environmental literature being generated for school children is, with some exceptions, in the genre of nature education. It is very important to expose young children to the beauties and wonders of nature. But as they grow older, it is important they begin to understand how human beings and human societies interact with their environment for their survival and growth, how these human interactions become a part of a society’s culture, and why it is important to rationalize our relationship with our environment. Children should be able to understand the science of environment, as far as possible, with the same tools as adults use or can use. School-GIS addresses all these key points with advanced learning methods by providing the appropriate learning–doing environment.
“Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire”. Addressing this concept, the School-GIS is a collaborative as well as community learning platform, which provides access to a wide range of information related to location. Unlike a fixed paper map, you can change the content of the maps presented on the screen, by turning “layers” on and off, and can also change the scale of the map by zooming in. Important objects in the map are linked to further information, either held in databases or via hyperlinks to other websites. You can search for streets, individual addresses, schools, or parks and view aerial images as well as access a wide range of local information, such as schools, theatres, hospitals, cinemas, art centres, sports facilities, and activities for children and young people.
More importantly, it can be an active learning environment, where students and teachers can not only consume information but also produce knowledge, feel proud, and engage collaboratively across schools breaking the barriers of language.
Methodologies
The whole idea of teaching is to make a complex reality understandable and facilitate the learner with tools to explore and understand it.
Cognitive bases: Children learn by building models based on their current understanding. The information received through teaching either replenishes or questions the model. Thus accumulation or accommodation takes place in the models. These models of reality are the ones that inform the learner’s actions. Anything that does not fit the existing belief may raise curiosity or disbelief, depending on whether curiosity is encouraged. The more complex a reality, the more support is needed to keep the model in tune with observations. If the model is verbal, like in language or mathematics, learners tend to create their own visual images and other physical associations to support the model.
But a model of geometry is difficult to build without hands-on drawing and verifying notions. Even more so if we deal with three-dimensional geometry. The issue becomes even more difficult when dealing with geographical reality, when you add to that the variations in scales, layers, and dynamics. This explains the cognitive difficulty in understanding environmental issues. GIS provides the visualization tools for all this to be understandable.
Processes of model building, which when supported by data and visual representation, can aid deeper insightful learning. This can be further advanced if supported by simulation for learning the dynamics.
Learning by doing can be effectively achieved when the learner can add to the repositories of information and knowledge.
• Geometry and attribute data in the form of databases are the adult’s way of making complex reality understandable.
• The teacher, in Robin Hood style, has to appropriate these means and bring them to the learner.
• Luckily, this is possible without any criminal complications these days.
Objectives
“The use of technology as a learning tool for environmental studies can make a measurable difference in student achievement, attitudes, and
interaction with teachers and other students”. Addressing this concept, School-GIS has some specific objectives.
• Creating a collaborative learning tool interactive enough to let students seek them out and work with them at their own pace.
• Providing a choice to the learner for a traditional class or a virtual class with the same efficiency and proficiency at knowledge capturing and understanding.
• Increasing productivity and efficiency of the education system.
• Providing multiple base layers for comparison and analysis.
Basic Features
Using this century’s boundless technology and its societal impact, School-GIS has some basic features.
• Basic navigation tools to zoom in/out/to full extent/pan.
• Search to zoom directly to an address/road/postcode/park/school/
garden.
• Query to get detailed information about school/garden/park/road.
• Print a map at different scales and illustrate a document.
• Layers of information you click on or off.
• Whole application uses free and open source software.
Why Use School-GIS?
School-GIS will enable the institution to bridge existing gaps between what is and what ought to be. Students using School-GIS, once they leave school to live as individuals in “the real world”, will productively think about work, play, and life.
Assessment of Present Education System
Studies show that the education system frequently falls short in promoting creative thinking and problem solving. There have been no big changes in learning methods during the last 100 years—changes that are urgently and immensely required to permit students to invent their own solutions in non-linear, flexible, innovative, and creative ways.
Teachers must encourage students not to receive knowledge passively.
They should encourage students to develop their own thinking.
Benefits of School-GIS
The School-GIS solution will act like an “information explosion”, which will dictate the need for faster and better thinkers to scan, digest,
assess, and act upon a bewildering bombardment of knowledge and understanding. With School–GIS, something new can be learned every day. Thus something new could be taught through the following means.
• Learning by doing.
• Visualization.
• Knowledge production.
• Create animations.
• Update websites.
• Data collection (like maps, information).
• Understand decision-making and administration.
• Fun and flexibility.
• Very engaging for pupils.
• An opportunity to add more creativity to teaching.
• Creates educational exercises (in the fields of geography, demography, history).
• Effective application to support information and communication technology in geography.
User Characteristics
School-GIS has a wide range of stakeholders such as students, teachers, ecologists, environmentalists, and different government and non- government agencies.
Student
School-GIS will encourage students to develop their own thinking, known as divergent thinking, and all permit students to invent their own solutions in non-linear, flexible, innovative, creative, and natural ways. Using School-GIS application, they could learn how to
• read, modify, and add data to a map;
• view aerial images and compare them with the paper or survey map;
• estimate distance and check it on the map with the distance tool;
• learn about scale, coordinates, orientation;
• measure a distance between different locations (that is, school–home) or a defined area (football pitch);
• study the local area with regard to amenities (stations, bus routes, schools, sports activities, art and entertainment); study local demographic data (population, household, percentage of
unemployed people, deprivation, environment data); recycle sites;
plan restrictions;
• learn about the local geography in detail;
• number the trees (older than five years) and find the density of trees;
• compare the ratio of trees to humans in identified different boundaries;
• produce annotated and thematic maps using a variety of text, line, and area tools; and
• link digital photos or other documents with the information mapped.
Teachers
Teachers must not systematically spoon-feed information; they must challenge their students not to be passive receptors of knowledge.
For that, School-GIS provides them the capability of integrating GIS with problem solving and leading students through the process of GIS analysis. With this application, they can get students to think about a place or a topic, ask questions about it, draw a map, and explore the patterns that appear.
Technologies
From the technology point of view, the different GIS-based tools and softwares used by School-GIS are divided into two main categories—
desktop based and server based. Desktop-based tools include OpenJUMP, Quantum GIS, ossimPlanet, Yudit, and DrGeo, while server-based tools include MapServer, PostgreSQL with PostGIS and Moodle, content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal and XWiki, and GIS toolkits such as ka-Map and OpenLayers.
Data and Content Management
The data available with School-GIS provide information to policymakers in government and industry as well as academics, consultants, and environmental groups to incorporate environmental values into cost–
benefit analyses, environmental impact statements, project appraisals, and overall valuation of changes in environmental quality.
Content is ordered by theme, year, methods, and author. Choose any of the sort order to get the different categories listed under them. Click on each category to get detailed information of the case study put up
in any particular section. At the development site, two main database systems are used—MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Approaches
Undoubtedly, offerings of technology have increased dramatically in the recent years. These advances also introduced a new educational nomenclature—virtual education. School-GIS is meant to use these advancements in natural ways to study the natural phenomenon as environmental studies.
Learning Methods with School-GIS
School-GIS has the following learning methods.
• Collaborative learning platform providing a common platform for accessing, sharing, and documenting with more productivity and higher quality.
• Community learning platform providing the use of technology in the education system for exploring the relationship between different natural patterns and human society.
• Knowledge creating and pattern evolution methods.
• Learning with nature.
Implementation
Major users of School-GIS are students, teachers, and educationalists who will use the product in one or more ways. It has the interoperable capability of collaborative management of content by students and teachers. It is a study kit for environmental studies having many automated facilities;
for example, students can add information (graphically and textually) and analyse the collated data, correlate different layers, and so on. Take the example of biodiversity monitoring and data collection. Students can start with A3 size maps of gardens, waterbodies, and riversides; mark the species and data regarding every plant; and prepare the ground for planning future planting efforts. Similarly, students can help the community to be better aware and prepared for disaster management.
This implementation phase may be followed up by teachers and student training for optimal use of School-GIS.
Outputs
School-GIS adventures in learning call for a creative, potent environment where individuals share meaningful knowledge and experiences in constructing new information and ideas about environmental sciences.
These adventures foster mutual collaboration that allows learners to apply newly acquired learning in the design of insightful, cognitive processing without obscurity or remoteness from real-life situations.
The application of School-GIS serves a mission—to educate the student and the citizen. If we value thinking and if we treasure the creative potential necessary to withstand future information challenges, we should rededicate ourselves to our profession as passionate educators.
Pros and Cons
School-GIS engages learners to rethink their old beliefs, knowledge, and understandings. It makes the learners compare new ideas with other individuals to assess whether new concepts and ideas are plausible and fruitful. A solid, grounded educational foundation can be built, which substantially influences instruction, education, and decision-making.
However, there are some drawbacks of School-GIS such as insufficient computer resource, lack of affordable GIS software, and lack of teacher training opportunities.
REFERENCES
Julien, P. Y., B. Saghafian, and F. L. Ogden. 1995. Raster-based hydrologic modelling of spatially varied surface run-off. Water Resources Bulletin 31(3): 523–536
Mitas, L. and H. Mitasova. 1998. Distributed soil erosion simulation for effective erosion prevention. Water Resources Research 34(3): 505–516 Mitasova, H., J. Hofierka, M. Zlocha, and R. L. Iverson. 1996. Modelling
topographic potential for erosion and deposition using GIS. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 10(5): 629–641
Vieux, B. E. 1991. Geographic information systems and no point source water quality and quantity modelling. Hydrological Process 5:
101–113
Vieux, B. E., N. S. Farajalla, and N. Gaur. 1996. Integrated GIS and distributed storm water run-off modelling. In GIS and Environmental Modelling: progress and research issues, edited by M. F. Goodchild, L.
T. Steyaert, and B. O. Parks, pp. 199–205. New Jersy: John Wiley &
Sons