Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Information for Rural Development: an introduction to the special issue

摘要

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related technologies have proliferated over the last decade. In the developing world, the nature of geo-information has influenced its use in a number of aspects of the development process. For example, the increasing availability of spatial data in the public domain (e.g. remotely sensed imagery freely downloadable from the Internet) means that some analyses that once were very expensive are now more easily undertaken. The abundant, broad-scaled analysis of land cover change in developing regions is an example of this (e.g. Lepers et al., 2005; Achard, Eva and Stibig, 2002). Furthermore, the integrative nature of geographic information systems allows the linkage of socio-economic information with biophysical, infrastructural and other geospatial datasets; this is enabling more policy-relevant analysis (Wood and Chamberlin, 2003; Wood et al., 2004). The upshot of all this is that GIS has become an increasingly important information tool for development.