A rising number of municipalities in Portugal are turning to open source software solutions for their Geo Information Systems, says Pedro Venâncio, a GIS engineer working for the municipality of Pinhel. "When it comes to GIS, in our municipality we only use open source", he says
Venâncio is involved in a program to switch in all the 13 municipalities in Cova da Beira region to open source GIS applications, replacing proprietary alternatives. "Training for the technicians has already started."
The GIS specialist was one of the open source GIS pioneers in the country. In 2010 he used, among others Quantum GIS, GRASS, GVSIG and many other open source components, to produce and update a forest fire hazard and risk maps. "This open source-based approach has not been officially adopted by the national Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests, but it is being used by many municipalities."
An extensive test of open source software alternatives for wildfire risk area mapping, was published by Venâncio on the Quantum GIS project website, in October 2012. "(The open source alternatives) proved to be of enormous quality, allowing all operations recommended in the National Forest Authority technical guides, in many ways more efficiently than with proprietary software."
The GIS engineer regularly presents the open source approach by the municipality of Pinhel. In September 2012 for instance, he addressed the attendees of a conference of municipal risk specialists. He showed them how to automatically produce hazard maps and forest fire risk maps, using nothing but open source. "This is well-established in the municipality of Pinhel, after several years of testing. The whole process, to calculate and map wildfire risks, requires very little human intervention."
Promoting this approach at a conference on open source GIS, in November 2011, he concluded: "The savings, when multiplied by all of Portugal's 308 municipalities, can be huge."
More information:
Quantum GIS and Forest Fire Risk Mapping in Portugal (case study)
Presentation by Pedro Venâncio (pdf, in Portuguese)
Open tools for the Municipal Operational Plan (video presentation)