Capacity building in the use of geospatial tools for natural resource management in Tajikistan: Final Report

The Swiss Swiss Consultant Trust Fund (CTF) support covered the period from July to December 2007 and comprised four main tasks: (1) Analysis of historic land degradation trends in the four watersheds of Zerafshan, Surkhob, Toirsu, and Vanj; (2) Translation of standard CDE GIS training materials into Russian and Tajik to enable local government staff and other specialists to use geospatial data and tools; (3) Demonstration of geospatial tools that show land degradation trends associated with land use and vegetative cover data in the project areas, (4) Preliminary training of government staff in using appropriate data, including existing information, global datasets, inexpensive satellite imagery and other datasets and webbased visualization tools like spatial data viewers, etc. The project allowed building of local awareness of, and skills in, up-to-date, inexpensive, easy-to-use GIS technologies, data sources, and applications relevant to natural resource management and especially to sustainable land management. In addition to supporting the implementation of the World Bank technical assistance activity to build capacity in the use of geospatial tools for natural resource management, the Swiss CTF support also aimed at complementing the Bank supervision work on the ongoing Community Agriculture and Watershed Management Project (CAWMP).

Capacity Building in Geoprocessing

Manual used for the implementation of CDE's Geoprocessing courses in the South and East. Composed of 6 modules covering important aspects of GIS handling and implementation: 1) Introduction to GIS; 2) Management issues; 3) GIS data preparation; 4) GIS data presentation; 5) Vector data analysis; 6) Raster data analysis. At the moment the manual is designed for use with ArcGIS. Work on a manual for use with open source software is currently ongoing. This manual was successfully used during several GIS training events in Kenya and Tajikistan.