To address food insecurity in Madagascar, CRS-Madagascar has received food assistance through the USAID funded Development Food Assistance Program (DFAP). The FARARANO project, through FFA interventions aims to reduce the vulnerability of the most destitute people at the rural areas and to contribute to countryside development by creating temporary jobs and improving community access to basic and environmental infrastructures. FFA activities are characterized by the construction and rehabilitation of:
- Agricultural infrastructures (irrigation system, drainage system),
- Tracks to open up villages and to ease access to health facilities, markets.
The use of Remote Sensing Images combined with Geographic Information System tools will be used to collect and to generate all necessary data to better estimate the nature of the tasks required for FFA activities and to potentially optimize the costs of these works.
The cost of an FFA activity characterized by the needs of Man/Day depends on the nature and the quantification of the tasks required for it. Thus, the collection and the processing of geospatial data from an FFA site is crucial to optimize its cost.
As a result, a workflow of spatial data collection and process was set up by CRS-Madagascar to adequately manage each FFA activity in order to optimize the cost of preliminary studies and implementation. The main goals of this project are:
- Providing a map of the land cover and use of each FFA site.
- Identifying nearby sources of raw materials (rubble, sand, vetiver, …).
- Geographically locating FFA infrastructures (track axis, dam axis).
- Affording Cross Section of a chosen area.
The collection of data and their processing were completely performed using ESRI solutions. The main tools used are:
- ArcGIS collector & 123 Survey for ground truth land surveys of land cover and use samples and the alignment of the axis of all linear structures,
- Image Analysis toolbar for the preparation of satellite images (clipping, bandset composition, NDVI calculation, visualization enhancement, ...).
- Image Analysis toolbar for the supervised classification of satellite images to obtain a map of the land cover and use of each FFA site and the soil characteristics.
- 3D Analyst tools for converting 2D elements to 3D features and for providing topographical cross sections.
Currently, not less than ten FFA activities are being validated and will adopt the aforementioned system. The results will be available and presented at the time of the conference.
Controlling and optimizing the cost of FFA interventions is essential for the successful completion of infrastructural works. An adequate geodecisional solution helps taking good decision and affording better estimation of all FFA activities.
