Border GIS/Planeta.com

Border GIS Conference
by Ron Mader

July 17, 1995
San Antonio, Texas

San Antonio, Texas - Ongoing efforts to produce Geographic Information System (GIS) maps of the U.S.-Mexico border took center stage on the second day of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) Conference July 17. GIS can be used as a tool for policy-makers. It allows the depiction of natural resources, demographics and political divisions in multiple layer maps. Currently, only one project envisions linking data not only across but along the 2,000-mile border. The Transboundary Resource Inventory Project (TRIP), spearheaded by the Texas General Land Office (TGLO), hopes to unite other regional efforts in an unprecedented binational collaboration.

"Ordinarily, an area with such high economic growth and development as the U.S.-Mexico border would be intensively studied and mapped," said TGLO Assistant Commissioner for Federal Relations Ty Fain. "But we don't find that. Everyone's paralyzed, so the border suffers a periphery phenomenon." The solution, says Fain, combines spatial inventory with the information highway. "With TRIP we can present a seamless body of spatial data for this area of intense trade and activity, environmental sensitivity, a border redefined by its natural resources. Currently, aerial photography of the region is underway.

Meanwhile, Fain is trying to gather data for other data layers, including groundwater resources. "The Hueco/Mesilla Bolsin watersheds are used by over a million people. Now we've found out that the data is incomprehensible. " TRIP is a partnership that has been forged over the past two years. It involves 10 U.S. universities, 6 Mexican insitutions as well as all of the U.S. border state governments. In the coming months in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sonora and Baja California will join Tamaulipas in the project. "Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit challenged us to go out and get support for this project," Fain said, adding that the department provided a small planning grant. The project has also received support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the President's Council for Environmental Quality. Beyond TRIP, there are a number of local projects that utilize GIS in their work along the border.

U.S. Geological Survey

The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) mission is to collect and disseminate geologic, hydrologic and typographic info throughout the United States. Because border data is important to the agency, USGS has signed an international agreement with Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Information (INEGI). USGS Latin American director Rick Sanchez briefed conference attendees on a variety of projects that will be of interest to border GIS users:

A pilot project will soon conclude, proving a borderwide collection of imagery (1:24,000 scale images of the United States and 1:50,000 quads from Mexico).

The Lower Rio Grande Valley digital data project will runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Falcon reservoir.

North American Landscape Characterization project is now complete across the US/Mexico border. The project provides multispectral data and Landsat data in collaboration with EPA, INEGI and NASA, among others. Spectral cluster data is being produced by the EPA Las Vegas lab.

The aerial photography initiative is underway to provide detailed imagery throughout the border area.

The Multi-year National Aerial Photography Program is completing photography this year for eastern Texas, and will finish western Texas imagery next year.

Texas/Mexico Borderlands Data and Information Center

Texas shares its southern border with four Mexican states: Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Chihuahua. Two years ago the Texas Natural Resource Information System (TNRIS) created the Texas/Mexico Borderlands Data and Information Center to meet the demands of government officials and academics. "Two issues dominate border meetings - data and water.," said TNRIS manager Charles Palmer. "It occurred to me there needs to be a place to find the border data, and we were an obvious choice."

TNRIS is itself part of the Texas Water Development Board, responsible for delivering water and sewage to areas on Texas side of the border. Expanding its collection of useful data and information is one of the center's primary missions. TNRIS works with 18 other state offices and works to coordinate placing border-related information onto the Internet, including water quality analysis collected by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC). A recent $30,000 grant from the EPA was used to purchase data from INEGI, including soils data, geologic data, water data, aerial photography. "We've been good at assembling this kind of information for a long time within Texas," Palmer said. "Now, we're trying to provide better information from the Mexican side of the border."

The Borderlands Center provides natural resources and census data to address issues relating to NAFTA, the rapid population growth on the border, public health hazards, environmental degradation and the colonias. As a state agency, TNRIS can sell its information to other government or academic institutions. Available data includes maps, aerial photography, census data, surface water data, groundwater data, weather data, geology and soils data and biological data. "We've only begun to scratch the surface," Palmer said. "We're ready to order the Mexican census. Then we want to work on accessing Mexican water quality data - with the drought, it's a burning issue." Palmer envisions the Borderlands Center not to be a storehouse of info, but a place that makes vital linkages among government agencies and academic institutions. "We want to be able to tell people where they can get the data," he said. Much of the information is currently archived on the Internet (http://www.twdb.state.tx.us) in a gesture of public good will. "We had 20,000 downloads in June alone," Palmer said. "We're expanding rapidly and feel the Internet can be well used to share information." TNRIS will sponsor a conference related to GIS November 28-29 at Austin's Pickle Research Campus. One track will be dedicated to the border data gathering. "Our biggest shortcoming is making the center binational," Palmer said. "It's binational in name, and our data is available to data users from both the United States and Mexico and United States. Now our emphasis is to establish working relationships with counterpart organizations in Mexico."

GIS in the Californias

The Tijuana River Watershed Project is directed by San Diego State University Professor Richard Wright, who also chairs steering committee for TRIP. This project will inventory existing GIS databases and users in an attempt to develop a user-friendly GIS for the region. The information will allow transborder spatial data sharing, analysis of environmental impacts incurred via urban expansion and extend multiple species mapping south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The project's main partners are the San Diego State University, The College of the Northern Border (El Colegio de la Frontera Norte -COLEF) and the municipality of Tijuana, and NOAH. The project will provide information on the 1,735-square mile watershed which mostly lies in Mexico. "The bulk of the watershed is lightly occupied, although impacts of human occupation are seen everywhere," Wright said.

The U.S. portion or drainage in upper portion drains into Mexico and drains back out into Tijuana River estuary on U.S. side. Requires binational cooperation The project receives support from NOAA since the agency administers the Tijuana River National Esturine Research Reserve - one of last functioning wetlands in the state of California. As the project develops a comprehensive GIS to be shared by US and Mexican users, the project coordinators are also engaged in social and political outreach, as well as bilingual environmental education. "We are trying to develop a GIS that takes into account needs of local users," Wright said. "Hopefully will lead to some level of watershed management." Wright sees the target of the project as a microcosm of border issues. "We find that water pollution and inefficient water use are problems throughout the border area," he said. "Natural resources are being rapidly depleted, and infrastructure development is not coming close to keeping up with population growth." The data for watersheds in general are woefully inadequate in he said. The information gathering is further hampered by inconsistencies of data across the border. " The project is an informal, academic exercise. As such it does not require formal authority from state or federal governments. "We have to do it informally, since we don't have authority to do cross border agreement," Wright said. "My opinion is let's go ahead and do it and see what happens."

San Diego-Tijuana Interface GIS Project

Mexico's College of the Northern Border (COLEF) is collaborating with the French Institute of Research for Development in Cooperation (ORSTOM) in a joint digital mapping project. ORSTOM is a French owned public service organization with a staff of 2,500. "COLEF is both a user of GIS and generators of information which should be systematized," said COLEF's Jorge Santa Vañez. Currently, the San Diego-Tijuana Interface GIS Project has a number of images publicly accessible on the Internet (http://gort.ucsd.edu/mw/colef.html), including 3-D models of the Tijuana region, depictions of Mexicali and the lower valley of the Colorado River and a 1980 image of land cover of the Tijuana Watershed. The program has three proposed databases:

A regional study - The database covers the north part of the Mexican Californian peninsula. The database is conceived for multi-users and multi-uses. The most exhaustive information and the necessary tool for research will be available to potential users (statisticians, demographers, geographers, and decision makers.

A study on the urban environment - The objective is to measure the impact of the urban growth in the city of Tijuana on the management of its surrounding natural resources.

A study on the rural environment - This second research area covers the Imperial Valley in the United States and the Mexicali Valley in Mexico.

ITESM GIS Lab Northern Border Projects

Another Mexican university, Monterrey Tech (ITESM), has a GIS Lab with a variety of border specific projects underway, according to Fabian Lozano Garcia, who directs the laboratory. "We are more inclined to start projects in specific area, trying to solve specific problems that we encounter and that are interesting from economic point of view. One of the projects will be to develop an inventory and monitoring system of the land use in the Laguna Madre. "We are establishing a GIS of the wetlands of the Lower Laguna Madre area," Lozano said. "The main concern is the proposed channel from Matamoros to Tampico. That will affect sensitive areas." If the plans to build the canal move ahead, GIS will be used to monitor the construction process. "The canal is not our only concern. Deforestation in the basin that drains into Laguna, as well as fishing, are problems for the Laguna Madre." ITESM is experimenting with a combined ERS-1 and Landsat-TM data set for wetland mapping. "It may have a synergistic effect," Lozano said. In addition, the lab is working on atmospheric modeling , characterizing PM-10 along the border in both seasonal and regional contexts. "We're coordinating our work with the Modeling lab to apply and evaluate dispersion models in order to study the dynamics of PM 10 and other pollutants in the air," Lozano said. This can be used to develop GIS for data management, interpretation and visualization of the modeling results.

Contacts:

The national office of URISA is located at 900 Second Street, NE, Suite 304, Washington, D.C. 20002. Phone: 202-289-1685; Fax: 202-842-1850; Email: urisa@macc.wisc.edu. The home page for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of URISA is located at http://www.csn.net/~castagne/link.html.

Ty Fain, Texas General Land Office, 1700 North Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas 78701-1495. Phone: 512-305-8996.

Rick Sanchez, U.S. Geological Survey. Phone: 703-648-5121; Fax: 703-648-5755. The agency's home page is located at http://info.er.usgs.gov/.

Charles Palmer, Texas/Mexico Borderlands Data and Information Center, Stephen F. Austin Building, Room 428, 1700 North Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78701. Phone: 512-463-8337; Fax: 512-463-7274; Email: tnris@twdb.state.tx.us. The center also has a World Wide Web site located at http://www.twdb.state.tx.us.

Richard Wright, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182; Phone: 619-594-5423.

Fabian Lozano Garcia, Monterrey Tech, Suc. de Correos "J," CP 64849 Monterrey, N.L.; Phone: (011-52-8) 328-4032, and (011-52-8) 328-4033; Fax: (011-52-8) 359-6280.

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