Spatial Information Preparedness for Environmental Enforcement in the Maltese Islands

Abstract

Spatial analysis of the environment takes place within various competing but parallel domains; physical, social, and natural environments partake to datasets that have the same baseline requirements as are a reliable topographic layer, updated aerial/remote imagery and dissemination tools. The process has proven to be arduous, expensive and barrier-strewn due to data costs, access issues and lack of interactive sites. The Maltese Islands have implemented a system that integrates the transposition of legislative measures as well as ensuring free dissemination through the launching of an initiative based on the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS). The latter activity sought to take the next step into the dissemination of spatial and environmental data to the academic, scientific and public communities. The Malta initiative was aimed to take national environmental monitoring capacity and the relative enforcement processes to a fully interactive online system, where users can analyse the potential infringements.

movecost: An R package for calculating accumulated slope-dependent anisotropic cost-surfaces and least-cost paths

“…GIS provides facilities to acquire spatial data, to integrate them in a common framework, and to meaningfully organize and interrelate spatial information. GIS and spatial data analysis prove crucial to research fields as diverse as environment and earth science [3,4], ecology [5], agriculture [6], public health [7,8], socio-economic [9] and forensic disciplines [10], crime studies [11,12], archaeology/anthropology [1,[13][14][15]. One of the aspects that GIS may help exploring is understanding the ways in which movement relates and engages with the surrounding space.…”

Research in Agricultural and Environmental Information Systems

“…The authors of Formosa, Pace, and Sciberras (2013) present an overview of a Maltese initiative related to spatial information dissemination. The scope of the project is to share multi-thematic spatial environmental information.…”