Yrjo Sucksdorff
Finnish Environment Institute, GIS and Remote Sensing Unit, P.O.Box 140, FIN-00251 Helsinki Finland, tel (+358-9) 40300643, fax (+358-9) 40300691, Yrjo.Sucksdorff@vyh.fi

Riitta Teiniranta
Finnish Environment Institute, GIS and Remote Sensing Unit, P.O.Box 140, FIN-00251 Helsinki Finland, tel (+358-9) 40300644, fax (+358-9) 40300691, Riitta.Teiniranta@vyh.fi

Abstract

Finland’s Environmental Administration consists of The Ministry of the Environment, The Finnish Environment Institute (FEI) and 13 Regional Environment Centres. FEI is responsible for the GIS in the whole administration. GIS is used to give basic information for decision makers and researchers, to describe and estimate the state of the environment and to spread products which raise environmental knowledge. The Environmental GIS can be divided into the following parts: data, users, hardware and software.

ENVIRONMENTAL GIS IS BUILT TO SERVE THE WHOLE ENVIRONMENTAL ADMINISTRATION IN FINLAND

The Ministry of the Environment is responsible for environmental policy and housing policy and for preparing legislation. The Finnish Environment Institute (FEI) is the centre for environmental research and development. FEI provides expert services for other environment authorities and for other customers. Regional Environment Centres (RECs) are responsible for environmental protection, land use, building, nature conservation, protection of the built environment and use and management of water resources in their respective regions.
The Environmental Administration employs a total of 2200 people, of whom 310 work for the Ministry of the Environment, 430 for the Finnish Environment Institute and 1460 for RECs.
The variety of different tasks, the large area of Finland (338 000 square kilometres) and the location of different offices all over in Finland has given special demands for the development of the environmental GIS.

DATA

The most important part of GIS is data. The environmental GIS has about 12 Gb of raster and vector data, which has been stored in the ArcInfo databases. All databases cover the whole of Finland. Scale varies from 1: 20 000 to 1: 1 million or pixel size from 2 to 200 metres.
In Finland there are several GIS data providers, who produce data having great importance for the Environmental Authorities. A lot of this data has been bought to FEI, for instance administrative boarders and basic maps from National Land Survey and soil maps from Geological Survey. Often the data bought does not fulfil the demands of FEI, so a lot of efforts must be put to reclassification, corrections, generalisation, topology building, lay-out building etc. From the data bought also new data is derived, for instance from DTM a hill shade map.
When there is a need for data, which is not in digital form, it is made in co-operation or by doing it self. Land-use and forest classification from Landsat TM images is an example of a co-operation product. There are many advantages in co-operation: the costs are shared, wider experience is in use and often the project can be performed faster than when doing it alone.
Environmental Authorities are responsible for certain GIS data production. The digitizing of drainage basins was the first big GIS project at FEI in 1988-1990. The digitizing was done with a Finnish software called Fingis and later the data was transformed to ArcInfo. The drainage basins and their sub-basins (totally about 8 000 basins) were delineated on 1:50 000 base maps and digitized manually at FEI from these originals.
The numerizing of groundwater areas from 1: 20 000 base maps was performed in the similar way, but now the work was done at Regional Environmental Centres (RECs). The project was co-ordinated by FEI. A lot of personal quidance at RECs was needed.
In addition FEI has produced databases for protected areas (about 2000 areas) and protection plans (about 2000 areas) in 1:20 000 scale and several other databases like scanned general plans, skidoo tracks etc.
NATURA 2000 protection plan for Finland was numerized with ArcView by RECs. The digitizing was done on-screen using numerical base maps and real estate boarders as background data. This was the first great GIS project done with ArcView. Because of this project the use of ArcView was doubled at the Environmental Administration. At the same time the strong and weak points of desktop-GIS were found. For this application, a special ArcView user interface was built.
The most important ready to use national databases are listed in Table 1. These databases are located on FEI’s GIS server from where everybody at the Environmental Administration can use them. Regional Environment Centres have copied most of these databases to their own NT-servers because the line speed between FEI and RECs is not fast enough to transfer continuously big databases.

Table 1. ArcInfo DATABASES AT FINNISH ENVIRONMENT INSTITUTE (the most important ones 30.8.1998, covering whole Finland)

RECs have also a lot of their own databases. These databases have only local usage in the area of each REC. If the database has national interest, each REC sends a copy of it to FEI, which is responsible for nation wide databases.
All databases are described on the Intranet. The contents of these pages are described in Table 2.

Table 2. THE CONTENTS OF INTRANET PAGES WHERE GIS DATA IS DESCRIBED

General information

Database name and a short description
Original scale
Coordinate system used
Coverage
Who has made the database
Who has copyright
Updating
Contact person
An example of the data (an image)

Coverage name and address in the NT servers hard disc

Technical information
Polygon attributes and their explanations
Line attributes and their explanations
Region attributes and their explanations
Point attributes and their explanations

A lot of environmental data has been collected to relational databases. The Environmental Data System (EDS) contains over 35 million individual observation measurements and identifications of chemicals, climate change, hydrology, water quality, etc. Most of these databases are geocoded so they can be combined and checked with GIS data. The ArcView extension has been built to check that the coordinates of observation points are correct, to make coordinate transformations if necessary and to make analysis to check other attribute data in the registers like the code of municipality, lake code, drainage basin code etc.

GIS SOFTWARE USED

The basic GIS-software is ArcInfo (9 unix-licences), which is mainly used for database management and analysis. ArcView is used as a user interface to ArcInfo databases from all of the aforementioned environmental offices spread troughout Finland. There are more than 150 ArcView licences connected to the network. ArcView is used for producing GIS-data, creating maps and for making light analyses.
The special user interface has been built to facilitate the use of environmental GIS. When using this extension the user chooses interactively the area of interest: whole Finland, REC, municipality, map sheet, drainage basin etc. The user interface makes a view with suitable background map information. The user can add more data from a pop-up menu, where all common databases are listed. When zooming in or out in the view, the user interface searches the best background data. Several other ‘buttons’ have been implemented to the user interface to help the usage of ArcView, for instance a new print button to facilitate the layout production.

USERS

FEI has a GIS and Remote Sensing Unit, which is responsible for all the basic GIS actions at the Environmental Administration, like general GIS databases, user interfaces, software management, etc. This unit takes also part to major GIS projects. For the basic GIS work there are three persons, and for GIS projects six.
Very much attention has been paid to co-ordination and functionality of GIS. General GIS information is exchanged by the GIS users network, wherein belongs one person from every unit of the Finland’s Environmental Administration. The network acts via e-mail and discusses at Intranet. Annual meetings with other GIS users are also arranged. All GIS information and hints are put to the Intranet open to all users.
ArcView support is arranged through ArcView contact persons. One person in each REC and one in each department of the ministry of environment and FEI belongs to this network. If the contact person cannot solve the ArcView problem he contacts FEI’s ArcView support. If FEI cannot solve the problem, the question is further sent to the local ‘Esri dealer’, with whom FEI has a support contract.
The GIS is co-ordinated at the Environmental Administration by a GIS steering group. This group makes decisions of supported software, database buying, arranges user meetings, makes the general yearly GIS action plan etc.
Every ArcView user gets two days of ArcView basic education. The students are using during the course FEI’s own data, so they familiarize with the data at the same time. Several other GIS-courses have been arranged like 'GIS-basics' and 'GIS-database building'. FEI’s GIS is responsible for these activities.
GIS-network is shown at the Appendix 1.

EXAMPLES OF GIS USE

GIS is more and more used at everydays work at the Environmental Administration. The user interface is used for numerizing new data like protected areas, NATURA 2000 network, protection plans, groundwater areas, dump sites, skidoo tracks etc. Several major projects utilize the user interface: GIS for regional use (planning, exceptional permits, cultural environment etc.), water quality maps for Finland, databank for recreation areas, realization plans for protected area plans etc. MapObjects and Internet Map Server are used to build a graphical user interface to observation registers.
GIS is widely used for different analysis: Soil, land cover, DTM and drainage basin layers are combined and analyzed together to calculate input variables for nutrient loss model, GIS is used in hydrological modelling (evapotranspiration, flood forecasts, flood zone estimation), biodiversity calculations, etc.
Map production is an important part of the GIS at the Environmental Administration. FEI alone has made more than 10 kilometers of A0 wide maps this year.

CONCLUSIONS

At the Finland’s Environmental Administration the use of GIS has enlarged very much during last five years. The first ArcView was purchased in 1994 and now we have 150 licences at the environmental offices spread throughout Finland. Desktop GIS has proven its usefullness in several projects and it will be utilized much more in the near future.
Anyhow there are several facts that hinder this development. There is always need for better data; better quality, better accuracy, better scale,… Sometimes even if the data exists, it is too expensive. Often the data needs much improvements, because it is made for map production, not for GIS analysis.
Often the users do not have proper GIS education, so they are not capable to utilize the software and data in the best way. Much attention should be paid to general and specific GIS cources and utilisation of the software.
All tasks are not possible to do with a standard ArcView – the more people use ArcView - the more they want to do with it. The solution for this is to buy some extra modules to ArcView or to order the job from FEI’s GIS unit, which is using ‘heavier’ software than a desktop GIS. Both ways are expensive and often too much time consuming.
The Esri softwares are expensive and so are the updates and supports, too. The update and support policy of Esri and its dealers is unclear. This makes it difficult to make long term plans how to develope the environmental GIS in Finland.

APPENDIX 1