GIS Specialist volunteer position for a project in Panama

Post date: Aug 5, 2016 2:58:38 PM

GIS Specialist volunteer position for a project in Panama

The Azuero Earth Project [www.azueroearthproject.org] is a United States tax-exempt organization (501-C-3) operating in Panama as the Proyecto Ecológico Azuero. The organization is dedicated to local education, reforestation and sustainable land stewardship on the Azuero Peninsula, on the Pacific Coast of Panama, about 100km west of Panama City. “The mission of the Azuero Earth Project is to preserve the earth’s ecosystems, protect biodiversity, and promote healthy communities by helping people to make informed decisions, take sustainable actions, and share knowledge.” The Azuero Earth Project (AEP) facilitates connections among scientists, educators, students, planners and designers and local communities to explore advanced concepts for appropriate land use with a focus on developing simple, sustainable models for architecture, agriculture and development.

As a part of its mission, AEP has a GIS mapping project to assess forest remnants and gaps and prioritize habitat conservation actions in a unique ecosystem threatened by development and overuse. This mapping and prioritization database increases our capacity to raise awareness and provide local landowners with sustainable land use options. Our goal is to make this database as comprehensive as possible in order to reinforce our role as an environmental connector on the peninsula, to create the links between scientists and information, landowners and sustainable land management resources, students and learning opportunities that will make the Azuero a healthier environment for all species.

The work that the GISCorps volunteer(s) performs is essential to constructing this database that will form the backbone of our work in the region. Fine-scale tree cover in tropical agricultural landscapes plays a critical role in carbon storage, biodiversity conservation and human livelihood. For example, trees in pastureland can store significant amounts of carbon, provide valuable wildlife habitat, and increase dairy and beef production by up to three times as much as in treeless pastures. However, small patches of trees that are otherwise embedded in agricultural land can be easily overlooked by many remote sensing techniques that classify land into “forest” and “non-forest” region. Restoring tree cover to riparian corridors is a major focus of AEP as a land management activity with numerous benefits for people and nature. The volunteer will assist with this goal by creating a dataset of fine-scale tree cover in agricultural land that will be used to identify riparian sites with potential for reforestation.

Qualifications: The volunteer(s) must be able to:

 Digitalize tree crowns from high-resolution aerial imagery;

 Classify tree crowns into discrete categories based on the spatial pattern of landscape tree cover

 Process and store large amounts of spatial polygon data

GIS Software/Expertise: The volunteer must have familiarity creating and editing features using GIS, such as ArcGIS or QGIS, as well as in Google Earth Pro (the main interface for digitizing). Basic knowledge of topology is also required. The volunteer must also be comfortable with visual identification of features in remote sensed imagery.

Duration: The required number of hours per week is estimated at 5-7 hours per week at for duration of approximately 3 months.

Type of mission: this mission does NOT require traveling and is conducted remotely. The volunteer will be using their own hardware and software and will be communicating with Azuero Earth Project contact person via emails, phone, or Skype.

If you are interested and available, please send an email to recruit@giscorps.org by Sunday, August 14, 2016