Over the weekend I spent a lot of time consolidating my notes, reviewing our progress and noting what needs to be done over the next week before I leave. It is an important time in the trip and it is crucial that the cadastral and enumeration surveys are now finalised so that John-Ross and I can start building the GIS. The field team and volunteers from the community have been really busy over the past week verifying and amending the two datasets and both will apparently be ready for us to use tomorrow.
In the meantime I use today to take another look at the Integrated Baseline Survey and in particular how the results from this survey could be linked to the GIS. The BRC are particularly keen to use this data (which I reviewed briefly in yesterday's post) as it contains comprehensive Livelihood and WATSAN datasets for the whole area which will be useful during the beneficiary selection process. For the data to be useful though each entry in the database must be linked to an individual building plot. The baseline database does contain GPS coordinates but they are full of errors and the accuracy of the GPS is 10m - not accurate enough to be used to assign the point to an individual plot.
Instead I use a small piece of Visual Basic Script to match the ID numbers, telephone numbers and names in the Baseline survey to those in the new enumeration survey (which we have detailed location information for). Preliminary results suggest that using this method over 80% of the building plots were linked to an entry in the baseline survey. This is a great result. We will meet later to discuss how we might link the final 20%.
Once set-up the GIS will be used by the BRC to select beneficiaries based on a number of key criteria such as physical status of the building and the economic and social vulnerability of the inhabitants. Today we met to discuss what the criteria for this selection process might be. I also explain in more detail how the GIS will be used to analyse and visualise the status of each building plot, as well as the spatial context of each plot, which is likely to be important when planning which households to assist. For example, if a medium-damaged building is positioned between two heavily-damaged buildings it is likely that that the medium-damaged building will need to be removed as well. Infact, the whole block might need to be removed.
In addition to the baseline survey work I am also designing an information sheet which will be linked to the enumeration survey. It will contain information on the occupants (owner name, ID), building status and the vulnerability status of the inhabitants. A unique information form will then be produced for each building plot and taken into the field in the next week or two. Surveyors will then review the information contained in the sheet.
Finally, we have also started doing a house-by-house photographic survey of Delmas 19. A GPS photograph is being taken of each plot which will be fed into the GIS and used as baseline material to show the status of the site prior to the commencement of the project. The photographs from Cite Romain are available to view by opening the KMZ file here. Note that the accuracy of the GPS is approximately 10 meters and that the latest image in Google Earth was acquired in November 2010 (11 months ago) so at the moment it might be difficult to identify each photographed building in the aerial imagery.
Once the GIS has been constructed though the photographs will be linked to the centroid coordinates of each polygon so that the photographs appear in the centre of each building. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow we will have a complete GIS with polygons representing each building plot linked to the social information of the occupants (owners and renters). We can then start producing some really interesting maps and we can start testing how the GIS can support the beneficiary selection process. In addition we will continue to collect field data which will be used to validate some of the remote analysis that has been done.
A 30-second video of Delmas 19 collected in the field is available to watch below.
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