Development of the open cadastre of protected areas in Ukraine Daria Svidzinska1, Oleksij Vasyliuk2, 3, Oleg Seliverstov4, Daria Shyriaieva1, 3, Anton Biatov5, 3, Dmytro Diadin7, Alevtyna Ponomarova4, Oleh Sklyar6, Svitlana Vinokurova2, Ievgeniia Luchnykova8, 9, Alexander Kleshnin8 1 2 Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Institute of Zoology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine 3 4 Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University 5 National Nature Park "Slobojanskiy" 6 7 National Nature Park "Hetmanskyi" O. M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv 8 9 Intetics-Geo Company National Scientific Center "ISSAR" Abstract Ukraine does not have a reliable and publicly available source of information and data about protected areas (PAs). Therefore crowdsource development of the open cadastre of PAs was jointly initiated by non-governmental organizations (NGO) activists, GIS-specialists, conservation researches and practitioners. As a result, primary data has been collected for all regions of Ukraine, and for 10 of them the process of borders digitizing and data import into the OpenStreetMap (OSM) has been started. Alpha-version of the online service 'Daily Ukraine OSM Extracts' for the rapid data access and validation has been launched and available from http://opengeo.intetics.com.ua/osm/pa/. Keywords protected areas, open geodata, OpenStreetMap, crowdsourcing Introduction PAs are widely recognized as a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation and environment sustainability (European Environment Agency [EEA], 2010). Aiming to catch up with the European guidelines and best practices (EEA, 2012; NatureSDIplus, 2015) Ukraine has set up an ambitious goal to raise the PA from 6,08% to 15% from the country area by 2020 (Law of Ukraine on the basic principles of governmental environmental policy of Ukraine till 2020, 2010). Despite the goals and requirements of national and international environmental policy and legislation Ukraine still does not have a single common, up-to-date, reliable and publicly available source of information and data about PAs. Previous attempts to develop national database of PAs have been scattered 225
and incomplete in their efforts to provide exhaustive and publicly available results. Also most of them were abandoned with time and currently contain outdated and incomplete information. Failure of these attempts can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, Ukraine has a complex hierarchy of PAs types represented by 11 categories that on the highest level can be divided into PAs of state and local importance. Borders and location of the PAs of state importance (nature and biosphere reserves, national nature parks etc.) are well known, and fixed in the field, because they have their own administrations, encompass wide areas, and popular tourist destinations. At the same time, their share in the total amount of PAs is only 8.88%. Greater proportion is represented by PAs of local importance (nature monuments, protected sites, conservation stows etc.) which constitute about 91.12%. These categories are usually small areas, that do not have their own administration, and protection service. Often, their location is badly documented and known only approximately with the borders that are not strictly fixed. Secondly, information about PAs is typically stored in inaccessible paper reports scattered amongst different local and regional state administrations. Moreover, there have been already known accidents of documentation lost during social unrest due to state of emergency, negligence, or criminal activity. And last, but not least is that development of the national cadastre of PAs is the kind of project that should be financed and supported from the state sources. This kind of support is not currently available in Ukraine which struggles with economical and geopolitical crisis, and cuts all possible expenses. Scarcity and inaccessibility of information and data significantly restricts PAs research, monitoring, and management. It also provokes violations of territorial integrity and land use regimes that put under threat protected species and habitats. As a result the effectiveness and integrity of regional and local nature conservation policy is seriously degrading. In case of state inaction civil society should become a driving force in the implementation of environmental initiatives. Understanding the urgency and importance of the issue, the project aimed at the development of the open cadastre of PAs of Ukraine has been initiated in July 2014. This is a horizontal crowdsourcing project implemented by two groups of experts in the fields of nature conservation and geodata respectively. Members of the project are represented by NGO, academics and researchers, conservation practitioners, enterprises, volunteers. Currently the project is leaded by the representatives of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, V. N.Karazin Kharkiv National University, and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The cadastre is expected to be characterized by the features as follows: actual corresponding to the current state of the PAs in Ukraine; reliable using credible and trustworthy sources of original information; exhaustive providing comprehensive and complete information; publicly available freely open to all relevant stakeholders; updatable open to changes and modifications to maintain up-to-date state and completeness. 226
Implementation practices and results The open cadastre of PAs aimed at improvement quality of PAs research, management, and monitoring through the achievement the following objectives: to establish free and open public access to the actual and updatable data and information about PAs; to support an innovative participatory approach gathering conservationists, researchers, technical staff, policy, and decision makers in creation, dissemination, and usage of publicly available data and information; to build knowledge and capacity in the use of geospatial data and software, by improving the professional level of technical and managerial personnel involved in PAs management and research; to initiate a process aimed at filling the gap between Ukrainian and international best practices and models for PAs management and monitoring. As the PAs research, monitoring, and management affects the interests of the numerous parties project is a cooperative effort among the various stakeholders represented by NGO activists, conservation researchers and practitioners, technical GIS-specialists, and members of the OSM community. Their primary effort is aimed at the original data collection and development of the initial spatial data infrastructure based on the OSM framework. The project is implemented through the following stages (Figure 1): 1. Primary data acquisition: original hardcopy documentation is scattered amongst various administrations (local, regional, national). The goal of this stage is to get legal access to the documentation and create its digital scanned copies. 2. Primary data sorting and completeness analysis: scanned copies are sorted and organized. In case of documentation lost or incompleteness request letters are prepared to inquire missing information. 3. Borders digitizing and validation: scanned maps of PAs are georeferenced, borders digitized and with some basic tags are uploaded into the OSM. Uploaded data is validated for the basic inconsistencies as follows: naming errors (incorrect or invalid characters, extra spaces, unnecessary words); multipolygon geometry errors (overlapping polygons, missing multipolygon relation); tagging errors (empty or invalid tags). Error reports are generated automatically, and summarized in maps and tables. Open-source software is used for work: QGIS for scanned maps georeferencing, JOSM for data creation and editing, PostGIS and Leaflet at the stage of quality control, and GeoServer for publishing. 227
Figure 1: Main workflow stages. 4. Attributes population: available supplementary information from paper documents namely cards of primary account that are supposed to be a reference frame for the national PAs cadastre will be collected and aggregated in the uniform digital attributes. 5. Data validation and verification: digitized borders will be compared against public cadastral map of Ukraine to identify potential inconsistencies, land use and territorial violations. Also field surveys will be performed to update and correct the data. 6. Public access establishment: online public access repository is supposed to be a web-site that provides a web-interface to the initial information sources, developed cadastre database, and machine-readable data download (ESRI shape-files, GeoJSON, KML). Derivative maps are expected to become available online and offline for field survey navigation and mobile devices. 7. Results dissemination and feedback: information about the cadastre will be distributed through social and public media, workshops for relevant stakeholders. Publications that describe project methodology, results, and best practices will be prepared and distributed online and offline. Accumulated feedback is expected to define directions for further improvement. The OSM was decided to be used as a common framework for the primary data creation and consolidation efforts due to the reasons as follows: complexity and flexibility of the OSM data model that allows to create, store, and manipulate various objects in nodes and ways, establish their spatial affiliation through relations, and provide well-structured description through the key=value tagging system; free and open access to the high-resolution imagery provided by 228
Microsoft Bing and Mapbox and available for tracing in the OSM as a basis for the digitizing of the PAs borders; access to the public GPS-data that is of great use for the positional accuracy control and enhancement; according to the Ukrainian legislation the data about PAs should be public, and once added to the OSM it inherits non-restricted access under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). Figure 2: Work progress as of March 2015. It is expected that work stages 1-2 to be performed once while stages 3-7 are connected into the cycle which means that sequence of steps can be performed multiple times to obtain the best result and keep the cadastre up-todate and reliable. Currently we are at the beginning of the project and stages 1-3 are performed simultaneously (Figure 2). Mailing list, OSM Forum and Wiki, Mapcraft, and Sharepoint are used for community coordination and communication. Also there is an alpha-version of the online service 'Daily Ukraine OSM Extracts' has been launched for the project purposes and available from http://opengeo.intetics.com.ua/osm/pa/ (Figure 3) that is currently being used to: monitor the overall progress; provide quick access to the data created (downloads available as ESRI shapefiles, KML, ESRI file GDB); rapidly assess data quality and edit errors; 229
prototype and test services for online data access and distribution. Figure 3: Web-interface of the online service 'Daily Ukraine OSM Extracts' available from http://opengeo.intetics.com.ua/osm/pa/ 3 Conclusions and perspectives As much of the work done by volunteers in their spare time, flexible tasks scheduling based on changes in capacity is used. It is planned to move to a more uniform planning as one of the organizations involved into the project will be able to allocate funding and resources on a regular basis. Nevertheless, application of the crowdsource data collection and processing has proven to be of great use for the joint development of the best practices and enhancement of the flexibility and scalability of their implementation. According to the rough estimates by the end of 2015 the following tasks are planned to be completed: development of the datasets for 5 regions and 1 city; initiation of the procedures for keeping the data up-to-date; publishing of the project's official web-site supplemented by the presence in the social media. Provisional key deliverables include items as follows: consistent and updatable spatial database of PAs in Ukraine; a website that contains project news, documentation, maps, data quality 230
assessment tools (validators), spatial data, and provides non-restricted public access to its browse and download; all the data, documentation, and codes developed within the project will be available to the community under open licenses (e.g. ODbL, CC BY-NCSA, GNU GPL respectively); developed and well-documented project approach and methodology available for further adoption; workshops aimed at policy and decision makers to cover project s results and collect feedback; workshops aimed at researchers, PAs managers, NGO activists etc. to cover project s results and collect feedback; community grown around the project (both OSM, and non-osm) through social media and offline events. As the project is based on open standards and technologies, its expertise and processes could be easily adapted to new regions and scaled to a higher level. In the future the cadastre will be able to be merged into the World Database of Protected Areas supported by IUCN and UNEP (Protected Planet, 2015). On the national level the cadastre database is expected to be harmonized with the Ukrainian SDI requirements that is currently under development and mostly relies on the INSPIRE guidelines and practices. References European Environment Agency. (2010). 10 messages for 2010 Protected areas. Copenhagen: Author. doi:10.2800/56932 European Environment Agency. (2012). Protected areas in Europe an overview (No 5/2012). Copenhagen: Author. doi:10.2800/55955 Law of Ukraine on the basic principles (strategy) of governmental environmental policy of Ukraine till 2020. (2010). Retrieved from http://zakon1.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2818-17 NatureSDIplus Best practice network for SDI in nature conservation. (2015). NatureSDIplus Good Practices. Retrieved February 25, 2015, from http://www.nature-sdi.eu/index.php? option=com_fabrik&view=table&tableid=3&calculations=0&resetfilters=0 &fabriklayout=default_grouped&itemid=73 Protected Planet. (2015). The latest initiative harnessing the World Database on Protected Areas. Retrieved February 25, 2015, from http://www.protectedplanet.net/about 231
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