Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
6295710 | Ecological Informatics | 2016 | 10 Pages |
Abstract
In Aotearoa New Zealand MÄori land is often owned by communities and managed by trusts. Under communal ownership, trust managers are expected to provide for their communities in culturally responsive ways, using alternative land-related paradigms. In the context of MÄori trust rural land management, geographic information systems (GIS) are seen as a beneficial resource to plan and support important decisions that have community-wide implications. For example, it is much easier to demonstrate visually the putative outcomes of spatial change to large numbers of people with the help of a GIS than it is to verbalise the effects of change. This paper reports on one aspect of such an application to a MÄori trust-owned South Island farm, where a GIS-based multi-criteria analysis of terrain and proximity was conducted using also local botanical knowledge input to indicate optimal areas of growth for traditional medicinal plants. The analysis yielded very useful results, with positive feedback received from the local community. As well as the need to verify the approach empirically, there are plans underway to apply GIS in this way to other similarly-managed farms in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, in order to build a more comprehensive decision support resource for farm management, further plant species need to be modelled, and informed by a wider data set that includes detailed soil data.
Keywords
Related Topics
Life Sciences
Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Authors
Antoni Moore, Marion Johnson, Janice Lord, Sam Coutts, Mariana Pagan, Jeremiah Gbolagun, G. Brent Hall,