This document discusses how GIS (geographic information systems) can be used as a tool for landscape management. It explains that landscapes need to be managed to ensure sustainable exploitation of resources. GIS allows spatial data on landscapes to be collected, stored, displayed and analyzed, and basic techniques like overlay analysis and neighborhood analysis can help with tasks like historical analysis, development planning, and monitoring changes over time. The document concludes that GIS is a core tool for professionals working in landscape management since most landscape management decisions have a spatial component.

1. Landscape management and GIS
Basic spatial analysis techniques
for landscape management

2. Landscape: what is it?
• Part of this module looked at both rural
and urban landscapes and what they
are
– The environment we exist in
– A resource for exploitation
– An amenity for recreation
• We are dependent on this environment
and cannot escape from it, so we must
manage it well

3. The rural landscape: an environment to be protected or exploited?

4. Urban landscape, the home and work place of most of us

5. Why manage the landscape?
• If we do not control our exploitation, we
destroy the resource
• The landscape is our fundamental
natural resource
• Exploitation is not evil
• The ideal is sustainable exploitation, but
the reality of sustainability will be
explored over the next two years of your
course…

6. Exploiting the resources of the rural landscape
Food production, water harvesting and power production
Timber Minerals

7. Landscape as an amenity
• We use the landscape for
recreation and relaxation
• This is both an emotional/spiritual
need and a multi-million pound
industry
• The landscape has both emotional
and amenity value as well as
monetary value

8. Using the landscape for recreation
Canoeing and camping-France Vineyards and hotels-France
Adventure tourism centre-
Malaysia
Farm tourism-Malaysia

9. Management: what is it?
• “To bend to one’s will”; “To administer”;
“To control”
• To prepare for the future by your
present actions.
• Management is based on the belief that:
– There will be a future of some sort
– Some potential futures are preferable to
others
– Good management aims to encourage the
achievement of a preferable future.

10. GIS as a tool for landscape management
• Geographical information systems (GIS) are
tools (amongst others) which we can use to
achieve our desired outcomes
• When managing the landscape we have a
constant need for maps (or models) showing
what we have now, what we would like to
have in the future and the consequences of
any actions we carry out
• GIS allows us to produce, store, display and
analyse this type of information quickly and
accurately.

11. GIS to study historical change in the landscape
• Elements of the contemporary
landscape can be surveyed and
mapped
• Historic landscapes can be digitised
from old records, maps and documents
• Pre-historic landscapes can be mapped
from archaeological survey and
interpretation of soils, pollen, geology.
• GIS can combine and compare all of
these

12. GIS can combine different data sources

13. GIS urban development modelling

14. Historical maps as sources of spatial data
• Historical maps
can be digitised as
raster
“background”
images or as full
vector maps
• Once digitised
they can be
combined with
modern maps to
measure change
and development
“wilderness” map, USA, 1867

15. Historical GIS case study
All towns “hurst”
• History buried un
names:
– Mapping towns
based on their names
can show historical
distribution of
immigrants or land
use. “by”
– Towns ending in –by
are Danish
settlements. Their
distribution shows
extent of Danish
occupation in 12th
century

16. Great Britain Historical GIS Project

17. Historical distribution of surnames as a measure of mobility
Swindell in 1881 Swindell in 1998
http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/default.aspx

18. GIS data collection: seismic studies
Managing a dangerous landscape,
recording the changes in shape of
an active volcano.
The data collected will be visualised
in GIS and areas of change
automatically highlighted.

19. GIS data modelling: soil nutrients
Models built to show the distribution
of soil nutrients, using isolated soil
samples as the data input and GIS
interpolation to show the variation
over the whole field.

20. GIS proximity analysis: Choosing development sites

21. Two basic types of proximity analysis
• Overlay analysis
– By overlaying different data layers, spatial
coincidence can be studied
• Neighbourhood analysis
– What things happen within a certain
distance of each other
• These two techniques were explored in
the a GIS workshop

22. Conclusions
• Landscape management is a common,
fundamental professional activity
• Management is just decision making and
implementation
• Decisions can only be reliable if based on
good information
• Most landscape management is spatially
influenced
• GIS is designed to work with spatial
information and so is a core tool for all
professionals working with the landscape.