The Masoala Peninsula of northeastern Madagascar contains one of the few large blocks of old-growth tropical forest remaining on an island nation that is recognized as one of the world's centers of unique biodiversity. Project Masoala is an Integrated Conservation and Development Program (ICDP), with the goals of developing a national park to protect key areas while providing for buffer zones that the local population can use for sustainable forest exploitation. ArcInfo is proving to be an important tool for integrating the wide variety of physical, biological, and socioeconomic data required to effectively carry out an ICDP. Malagasy 1:100,000 maps were traced, scanned, and vectorized to extract hydrology, inundated zones, geology, roads, villages, and 100m contours. TOPOGRID (Arc v.7) converted the vector hypsography to a 100m DEM, which was used to derive slope, aspect, insolation, and topographic position (ridge, slope, valley, flat). Forest cover in 1957 and 1991 was determined by interpreting aerial photography and SPOT imagery, giving us the opportunity for evaluating land use changes. Global positioning systems were used by survey teams recording both biological and socioeconomic data such as village age and population.
The GIS is currently being actively used in the park delimitation proposal. Potential forestry management zones are being identified by a combination of access and proximity to settlements, while alternative park designs were evaluated by examining how much of the physiographic diversity of the region is protected. A critical step is installing the system in Madagascar, using ArcView2 and PC ARC/INFO, where it will be used for the ongoing design process and the management of the park and buffer zones.
Andrew D. Weiss
Center for Conservation Biology
Department of Biological Sciences
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94350
Telephone: 415-725-5585
Fax: 415-723- 5920
Email: aweiss@bing.stanford.edu
Claire Kremen
Wildlife Conservation Society