WWF - Pakistan is currently implementing a five-year Indus for All Programme for the conservation and poverty alleviation in the Indus Ecoregion. During the planning phase of the Programme, a strong need of a comprehensive Geographic Information System (GIS) at Ecoregion level was identified. Under the Programme, WWF – Pakistan has recently launched a WebGIS based Interactive Social and Environmental Atlas of the Ecoregion and the Decision Support System (DSS) of the three prioritized Districts (www.dss-foreverindus.org).
This paper aims to discuss the application of MapServer (Version 2.0) in planning and decision making for Natural Resource Management. Over the past years, MapServer has become popular among open source GIS technology due to its cost effectiveness and its capability of handling diverse types of GIS data.
The application is being hosted by Apache webserver with embedded modules of UMN MapServer. MapServer uses OGR and GDAL libraries to translate files from one file format to another. The whole structure of this WebGIS application is based upon PHP, HTML, Java Scripts, mapscript, PostgreSQL (as database). The combination of all above enhanced the user interface and functionality. A detailed GIS database was established by using PostgreSQL that is a powerful, open source relational database system. Mapfile that contains the geometry, annotation and symbology of the GIS data layers was used to display the map contents at the client side. MapServer creates legends and scale bars (configurable in the mapfile) and generates reference maps.
K. Gill, N. Hussain, U. Saeed, I. Ashraf, R. Nawaz.
WWF Pakistan