The FAO/IAEA Tutorial DVD on Using Open Source GIS Techniques in Insect Pest Control Programmes

Area-wide insect pest control programmes rely on updated geospatial data for efficiently conducting and evaluating baseline data surveys and progress monitoring. Soft- and hardware available as geographic information system (GIS) packages are applied to analyse and understand these data for planning and implementing optimized pest intervention strategies.

Many developing countries need to address major insect pest problems and face difficulties to fund license extensions for commercial GIS-software. In recent years, the software development known as free open source software (FOSS) has made great strides in producing high quality software applications, and GIS is no exception. Insect pest control programmes can now take advantage of the development of the GIS FOSS.

The tutorial “Using Open Source GIS Techniques in Insect Pest Control Programmes”, developed by the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre, offers a practical hands-on learning experience. The video lessons include an introduction to GIS and provide special applied chapters for the use of GIS in programmes against fruit fly pests, screwworm flies and tsetse flies. The self-contained LiveDVD also includes a broad collection of pre-installed GIS software, ready to use in any computer without further installations.

The tutorial package is intended for use by senior personnel tasked with insect pest control and consists of an introductory pamphlet, a tutorial DVD with the video lessons and the GIS software and a USB flash drive to be used throughout the tutorial for saving the work done.

DVDs are available upon request.