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Jenness, J.; Dooley, J.; Aguilar-Manjarrez, J.; Riva, C.
African Water Resource Database. GIS-based tools for inland aquatic resource
management.
1. Concepts and application case studies
CIFA Technical Paper. No.
33, Part 1. Rome, FAO. 2007. 167p.
ABSTRACT
This report represents a follow-up activity based on the recommendations by the
Committee for Inland Fisheries of Africa (CIFA). The report is an update of an
earlier project led by the Aquatic Resource Management for Local Community
Development Programme (ALCOM) entitled the “Southern African Development
Community Water Resource Database” (SADC-WRD). The body of work
presented in this publication represents both an expansion to the earlier data and
an enhancement of the original SADC-WRD analytic interface. Extended to cover
the entire African continent, the new set of data and tools has been entitled the
“African Water Resource Database” (AWRD). The overall aim of the AWRD is
to facilitate responsible inland aquatic resource management. It thus provides a
valuable instrument to promote food security.
The AWRD data archive includes 28 thematic data layers drawn from over
25 data sources, resulting in 156 unique datasets. The core data layers include:
various depictions of surface waterbodies; multiple watershed models; aquatic
species; rivers; political boundaries; population density; soils; satellite imagery;
and many other physiographic and climatological data types. The AWRD archival
data have been specifically formatted to allow their direct utilization within any
geographic information system (GIS) software package conforming to Open-GIS
standards. To display and analyse the AWRD archive, the AWRD also contains a
large assortment of new custom applications and tools programmed to run under
version 3 of the ArcView GIS software environment (ArcView 3.x). There are six
analytical modules within the AWRD interface: 1) the Data and Metadata Module;
2) the Surface Waterbodies Module; 3) the Watershed Module; 4); the Aquatic
Species Module; 5) the Statistical Analysis Module; and lastly, 6) the Additional
Tools and Customization Module. Many of these tools come with simple and
advanced options and allow the user to perform analyses on their own data.
The case studies presented in this publication illustrate how the AWRD archive
and tools can be used to address key inland aquatic resource management issues
such as the status of fishery resources and transboundary movements of aquatic
species. This publication by no means cover all the issues that could be resolved
using the AWRD, but they do provide a solid reference base for inland aquatic
resource management in Africa. Based on a review and recommendations by
CIFA, a number of opportunities to implement the AWRD tools and data in
Africa have already been identified. Likewise, a number of future developments
for the AWRD have been proposed, including AWRD-like frameworks for Latin
America and Asia.
This publication is organized in two parts to inform readers who may be at
varying levels of familiarity with GIS and with the benefits of the AWRD. The
first part describes the AWRD and is divided into two main sections. The first
presents a general overview and is addressed to administrators and managers
while the second is written for professionals in technical fields. The second part is
a “how to” supplement and includes a technical manual for spatial analysts and a
workbook for university students and teachers.
The primary AWRD interface, tool-sets and data integral to the function of the
AWRD are distributed in two DVD’s accompanying part 2 of this publication and
are also available for download on the Internet in FAO’s GeoNetwork and GISFish
GIS portals. A more limited distribution of the above primary database/interface,
but divided among ten separate CD-ROM disks, is available upon request to
FAO’s Aquaculture Management and Conservation Service. Also, high resolution
elevation datasets and images amounting to 38 gigabytes are available upon request
for those who need them.
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