A task force made of 4 partners within the AMIGA project, namely GEOSYS, INRA, Aarhus University and the James Hutton Institute was commissioned to plan a shared geographic information system (GIS), which will function as a database with the aim of enabling a harmonised approach to spatial and temporal information throughout the project.
After one year of activities, the database has been designed and is now made available to the AMIGA consortium, in particular to those partners dealing with experimental sites, collation of historical data and monitoring activities. Partners will then start to collect spatial data to be added to the system.
GEOSYS has been mainly in charge of bringing the latest technical developments in the GIS. All the other partners have contributed with their extensive experience of designing and using GIS and databases. A User Group has been representing the interests at all scales, whether molecular, field-based or regional.
The James Hutton Institute has been supporting GEOSYS in the full process, defining and analysing the indicators that are most sensitive to change in each region and the factors that have most strongly brought that change. In parallel to development of the database, a main task has been to collect background information on change in land use, cropping practices and the economic returns of arable farming for representative crops and areas in each of the 5 regions.
The work behind the development of the GIS has been made with the collaboration of all the partners involved, who had the task to consider in detail the type and resolution of data, the most appropriate GIS and database structures, protocols for collecting and entering information and the type of analysis required to link historical and regional data and new information from experiments and monitoring.
The GIS will be fully tested and operational starting from November 2013.