Abstract:
The recent decades have seen a growing interest in applying Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) to community empowerment and policy formulation. This has been made
possible through approaches like participatory design, data collection, and effective
implementation strategies. The limitations of traditional GIS alienated the local and
marginalized communities. This paved the way for the evolution of traditional GIS to
participatory GIS (PGIS) which has reshaped the way community engagement is
conducted. In environmental conservation, PGIS has been applied in various areas
b
including mapping naturally occurring harmful species to alert the general public and
monitoring river water levels to improve hydrologic forecasts. The Muringato
catchment, one of the River catchments within the Greater Tana basin, and is important
for the water recharge of the Greater Tana basin, has been faced with numerous
environmental challenges. These challenges include deforestation, water abstraction,
and riparian encroachment which have reduced the natural resources ability of the
catchment to support the growing population. PGIS approach needs to be implemented
within the catchment to identify and visualize the location of the incidents for the
appropriate agencies to act and thus curb the environmental destruction within the
catchment. This research sought to implement a PGIS approach to identify and visualize
the environmental incidents within the catchment in near-real-time for its conservation.
The approach utilized a mobile crowd mapping platform and a web-GIS platform PGIS
tools for effective engagement. The crowd-mapping platform was custom-developed,
using Android studio, PHP scripts, and PostgreSQL database, for reporting
environmental disturbance incidents within the Muringato catchment. The web-GIS
platform was also custom-developed using Django and GeoDjango frameworks and
PostgreSQL Database, to visualize the reported incidents data from the crowd mapping
platform in near-real-time. With the Government of Kenya enshrining public
participation in the constitution of Kenya, 2010, the study hypothesized that
implementing PGIS for environmental conservation would stir the Muringato
catchment stakeholders to conserve the catchment. These stakeholders included; the
Muringato water resource users’ association (WRUA), Water Resource Authority
(WRA), and Kenya Forest Service (KFS) among others. Because of their local knowledge
of the environment including knowledge of the environmental disturbance incidents
within the catchment, the Muringato WRUA were targeted to utilize the crowd
mapping platform to report the various incidents within the catchment. The other
stakeholders, since were involved mainly in policy formulation and implementation for
environmental conservation were targeted to utilize the web-GIS platform to monitor
the reported incidents by the Muringato WRUA. This ensured collaboration among the
various stakeholders who were all interested in the catchment conservation. A total of
85% (18) WRUA members attended the mobile PGIS tool training and fieldwork
110
sessions, while 71% (15) WRUA members attended the evaluation session conducted
16 weeks after the training session. A total of 53% (16) review responses of the webGIS
platform
were
received
from
the
30
sampled
stakeholders.
26
users
had
utilized
the
crowd
mapping
platform
to
report
various
environmental
disturbance
incidents
within
the
catchment
at
the time the evaluation session was being conducted. The incidents
included deforestation (25 incidents), dam construction (7 incidents), and soil dumping
(2 incidents). Thus, the PGIS tools developed aided the reporting and visualization of
the incidents in near-real-time. The near-real-time reporting of the incidents was crucial
for environmental conservation stakeholders to make preliminary assessments and draft
action plans to curb the incidents. Thus, the use of the PGIS tools aided the
implementation of the PGIS approach to the environmental conservation of the
Muringato catchment. The framework of implementation could be adopted for the
conservation of other river catchments as well.