Teaching manager: Dr Valérie SOTI, CIRAD-UR 115, assigned to the Centre de Suivi Ecologique (CSE) in Dakar (Senegal).

Trainers: Sandrine AUZOUX, CIRAD-UR 115 in Montpellier; Dr Ousman BATHIERY from CSE Dakar (geomatics specialist); Dr Vincent OREKAN, lecturer in geography – remote sensing – GIS, Department of Geography and Land Use Planning (DGAT), Faculty of Humanities, the Arts and Human Sciences (FLASH), UAC.

Rationale:

Research on crop pests is increasingly centring on landscapes (or mosaics of habitats), rather than crop plots, as the appropriate study scale for determining pest population dynamics and their interactions with their environment (see dP DIVECOSYS scientific objectives). This change in scale means using new tools and methods to acquire and manage spatialized data, from geographical positioning (GPS) to mapping (QGis, ArcGIS), through the design and management of geo-referenced databases (GIS).

Objective:

This intensive practical course enabled participants to master the concepts and methods for acquiring, managing and recovery of information on the spatial ecology and management of crop pest populations. The fundamentals of geographical information and its processing were put into practice using the Quantum GIS (QGIS) freeware.

The course also allowed DIVECOSYS members to share and pool knowledge and scientific expertise, to consolidate the work under way (at least three DIVECOSYS research projects in collaboration and three theses concern the landscape scale), and fostered the emergence of new research projects in synergy.

Programme:

The course centred on mastering the Quantum GIS (QGis) which serves to exploit geographical information systems (GIS). It has the advantage of being open-source (ie free to access). It is used to acquire, store, update, handle and processe geographical data (spatial analysis and mapping). It can use the main data formats (ESRI shapefiles, MapInfo Tables, etc). It can be used on several platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) and is available in several languages. the course ran for five days and comprised ten modules enabling mastery of the GIS tool, from gelocalized data acquisition to analysis, and thematic map generation. An additional one-day module on collecting field data from a GPS (notably electronic field notes) and data post-processing was also organized. Field data was collected using the Noni GPS Plot freeware, which has the advantage of using maps obtained from Google Earth, for instance.