Geographic Information Systems

in Mine Action
Authored By

LACROIX, Pierre Marcel Anselme

University of Geneva
&
Geneva International Centre for
Humanitarian Demining
Journal for ERW & Mine Action
A land-mine is a perfect soldier: "Ever courageous,
never sleeps, never misses.
--- Khmer Rouge - Cambodia

What is this paper

General paper, try to propose GIS for mine action

Discusses the advantage and Capability of GIS for Mine
action
Primitive idea based on existing GIS feature and mine action
requirement
Discusses GIS tools , 3D terrain analysis and its effect in
humanitarian operation

Content

Landmine and Uxexploded ordnance

Challenges in Landmine- Present scenario
Introduction of GIS Landmine application
GIS Use in Mine action
Current data System IMSMA
Mine Action Decision Making
GIS maps
Connecting GIS with IMSMA
3D Analysis
Afghanistan Case study
Analyzing the Accessibility
Prioritizing Activities and Evaluating cost

Introduction of GIS Landmine application

Effective Decision making in mine action

Geographic factor
Population distribution
Infrastructure
Terrain
Vegetation

Application of GIS in landmine action

Integrating mine data with

Terrain, soil, vegetation, land use data

Social economic data

Integrating Environmental + Socio Economic + Cultural Specificity of

mine affected areas
Decision and priority management of demining authority

GIS Use in Mine action

Generate intuitive map at various scale

For

operator in field
Country level governance
International regulation body

3D analysis of spatial data

Improve prioritisation and planning of field
operations
Help to model the nominal operational difficulty of
demining
Determine

suitable assets for a given task

Current data System - IMSMA

Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) have

developed the system
IMSMA- Information Management System for Mine Action (Information
management system 1999)

It contains maps of different scale (country structure, local structure)

Landmine affected areas represented in polygon, each polygon has its
own item table, which contain information on mine
Its has theme based tool bar on map (as points in polygon)

Combines RDMS with GIS

Location
Hazard
Accident
Associated place of the country structure

IMSMA- Lags in advanced tools and not using the full potential of GIS

IMSMA Screen View

Mine Action Decision Making

Information needs to be integrated with geospatial component

Factors influencing main action decision making

The geographic location of hazards and their type

Historical information about hazardous areas
Marking in the field
The type of mine risk education provided or yet to be provided
The location of populations, internally displaced persons and returnees
The location of the working teams
Local terrain conditions
Weather conditions
Accessibility, eg, information about infrastructure, traffic, security
Logistical constraints
The assets deployed in an area and tasks carried out.

GIS maps

Many maps were created to help on demining activity and observing the
progress , planning

Large-scale hazardous area location maps

Contamination density maps

Map information extraction

Required area maps layer (e.g. hazardous area map) overlaid on top of
many other layers

Topography

Urban Areas

Critical Infrastructure

Land Cover & Land use changes

Development & Populated areas

Base map

Slopes, roads

Meteorological condition

Current position of the team

Large scale hazardous map (CHA/SHA)

Representing every hazardous area by a Polygon (delimited boundary) and

point symbol marker

This Large scale map (e.g. Village map) laid on different layer

Example Hazardous area polygon overlaid on satellite image of the area

Represent village built-up in the mine cleared areas

Map up-dation have to be done at least on a weekly basis

Updating Geospatial information

Involves recording attributes

Types of hazard

Status of the hazard

Co-ordinate information

Information represented on the map

Symbol sized proportational to the observed

observed items

Different symbol or color used for each types

Contamination density Map

Aggregate information on hazardous map (indicating all Hazards) become

un readable due to large data (in small scale maps)
Need for single data, statisfy the requirement
A density value is assigned for each location of map depended on number of
Hazards found within a distance

GIS Density interpolator tool used to compute the density

Uses of Contamination density map

Shows variation of landmine contamination

Setting the priority

Core data map

Afghanistan data

Density data map

Choropleth Map

Information map on each administrative unit

ERW areas are aggregated by administrative unit and coloured according
to the contamination, optionally normalised by the area of each unit
The below figure set the correct priority

We see both high contamination + Population at Risk

Connecting GIS with IMSMA

IMSMA contains important updated attribute

information
Need a connection between GIS and IMSMA
GICHD developed START - Simplified Toolbar to
Accelerate Repeated Tasks
START
ArcGIS plug-in used to quickly extract the IMSMA data for GIS
analysis
Help to convert EXCEL and GPS date into geo-spatial information
Help in production of maps

3D Analysis

GIS can create 3D surface(X,Y,Z(elevation))

Importance of 3D analysis

A major advantage of 3D GIS is accuracy of surface area calculations

increase the accuracy of area size calculations of contaminated surfaces;

More realistic assessment of the operational difficulty of demining by integrating slope
and elevation information into the analysis
Better prepare field operations
Determine the potential location of mines that may have moved over time through
water run-off or surface movement
Report on demining activities in a more visually intuitive manner.
Actual terrain is taken into account (instead of flat projected surface)
25% slope , projected area 3% less than actual area
Reduce the reporting error of contamination

Slope

Ate of change of elevation in a adjacent location

Afghanistan

Slope date from SRTM (Shuttle radar topography mission) DEM

Combining slope dataset with contamination data
Gives information reg- operational difficulty of demining
Transportation
Machine
Hill shade function along with slope and elevation image improves the
visualization of the surface for analysis (enhance marking and fencing)

Ref- Digital elevation model on Afghanistan and derived slope and hillshade.
| Data source: Jarvis et al. (2008)

3D terrain contamination Visualization

Visualizing study area in 3D give lot of inference than 2d Planimetric data

3D GIS
analysis
implemented
by Mine
Action
Coordination
Centre of
Afghanistan
(MACCA ) for
slope
analysis

3d Analysis - Hydrology

Hydrology and watershed modeling

Hydrological network can be derived from DEM
Gives flow length , downstream and upstream
This gives information of possible displaced mines
Dislocated mines are always difficult to detect

3D Analysis -Telecommunication

To address telecommunication issues in the field

View shed analysis
Identify optimal satellite receptor
VHF repeater locations.
Predict strength of GPS signals
Help in organising overflight operations with unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAV) and airplane observations (eg, for large-scale mapping purposes)

Very high frequency (VHF ) coverage

Brown cells are covered by at least one red
observation point
Yellow cells are located in radio shadow areas

Analyzing the Accessibility

GIS based Road network analysis

Take into account slope, land cover and road quality
GIS based Transport network analysis
Dispatching medical care to victims
Determination of the best location for building a new health facility
Planning of in-field operations
Road clearance management and prioritisation
humanitarian logistics to locate new warehousing facilities

Minimize the travel time and distance in the mined area

Identify nearest medical facility (based on accessibility & cost)

Prioritizing Activities and Evaluating cost

GIS advantage lies in its capacity to combine various data sources to

generate new information
IMSMA data combines with Non IMSMA data
Combining many data GIS can Help
Prioritise hazard clearance based on any number of criteria
Determine how much time and effort clearance of a particular
hazardous area would take, by integrating local terrain and
infrastructure conditions
Decide which type of asset should be deployed by comparing different
scenarios based on different asset characteristics under similar terrain
conditions
Have better knowledge of the accessibility of a planned hazardous
area and knowledge of local terrain conditions for planning future tasks.

Prioritizing to Decision making

Attribute based score allotted to each area to define its priority

GIS capability offers us to prioritize demining based on

Socio-Economic impact analysis of landmine hazards

Range Munitions
Resources and facilities Blocked
Number of recent victim

Close proximity to infrastructure of interest (e.g. hospital), road, Industry

The resultant scoring from the process by GIS can be fed to Decision making and
priority setting
Operational difficulty of demining

Visualizing the clearance difficulty due to

Terrain
Vegetation & Ground softness
Precipitation & Temperature
Pathway width

Future development

Focus on sharing the geospatial information through

web application
Geoportal