Project Title

World Wide Fund for Nature – WWF | Compass Informatics

Date

02/2020 – 03/2020

Location

London, UK

Client

World Wide Fund for Nature – WWF UK

Business Sectors

Infrastructure/Environment

Services (Technical Disciplines)

The WWF provided Compass with coordinates of up to 2000 linear projects with start and end points across the world. Compass was also provided with a rasterised elevation model and existing infrastructure sourced from OSM.

Compass Informatics first cleaned and attributed the data whilst discussing the possible business rules and costings with the client team. Using ArcPy and ArcGIS, Compass was able to apply linear referencing to the data and was able to model the routes the projects were likely to take. This model provides flexibility to accept different datasets, accommodate different suitability criteria, work with weighted criteria and define land use types. The analysis of the model was be divided into 4 stages:

• Stage1: Data Collection, Collation and criteria evaluation,
• Stage2: Reclassification,
• Stage3: Implementing the multi-criteria analysis
• Stage4: Route Selection and Evaluation

To assess the possible environmental impacts Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) can incorporate spatial data and stakeholders’ preferences into quantified values for assessment (Malczewski 2004)^[1]. A powerful component of a GIS decision support system is its ability to visualise the context of a problem and its alternative solutions (Gomes and Lins 2002). Therefore, the integration of a GIS decision support system and MCDA model can provide a method to evaluate several alternatives, based on multiple classified criteria.

[1] Malczewski, Jacek. (2004). GIS-based Land-use Suitability Analysis: A Critical Overview. Progress in Planning. 62. 3-65. 10.1016/j.progress.2003.09.002.

Project Outcomes/Objectives

Our team ran two training sessions with the WWF’s conservation intelligence team to hand over the model and run through how to deploy is Arc GIS analyst. The model is now used by WWF team across the globe to assess possible environmental risks from BRI projects and lobby the appropriate local authorities.

Our Role

Our role was to clean, consolidate and analyse a dataset of over 2000 BRI projects. We plotted the likely linear route of each project using costing for a variety of variable just as land use, topography and existing infrastructure. New data and new costings can be applied to the model and our team ran training sessions with client stakeholders so the model could be used by WWF staff and contractors

Geoscience Ireland Contact

Gearóid O’Riain (goriain@compassinformatics.com)