[Qgis-community-team] Q-GIS case study from Tanzania

[Nick McWilliam]

Hello Q-GIS community team -

We just wanted to let you know about a successful two-day GIS training
session held in Tanzania last week, using Quantum GIS. Would you like to use
this as a case study? (http://qgis.org/en/community/qgis-case-studies.html)

The event was organised by the Udzungwa Elephant Project, based next to
Tanzania's Udzungwa Mountains National Park, a range of evergreen forested
mountains reaching over 2,500 metres, with participants from Tanzanian
National Parks and the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre. You can find
details and pictures here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Udzungwa-Elephant-Project/157164174392263
http://udzungwa.wildlifedirect.org/2012/02/10/qgis-training-for-park-staff/

Trainees used their own laptops and were provided with the installer for
QGIS 1.7.3 along with key data layers covering the National Park: protected
area boundaries, scanned topographic maps, a DEM, roads, ranger posts, and
habitat types. By the end of the two days, everyone was able to add GPS
download data, create and edit new layers, save map projects, design print
composers, and save graphics files for inclusion in reports and
presentations - this last feature is specially useful in using GIS to help
in normal workflows. Even during the course, National Park staff were using
the GIS to view the GPS locations of new-reported elephant carcass locations
- the result of poaching - and to start planning responses.

At a technical level, the one area of difficulty we encountered was with
direct GPS connection, so EasyGPS and MapSource were used as intermediaries.
The Table Manager extension came to the rescue for altering and deleting
attribute fields - might this become part of the standard installation?
These issues aside, everyone's reaction to the software was extremely
favourable in terms of funcionality and usability and we all appreciated
being beneficiaries of a fantastic amount of work by the Q-GIS development
team.

Best wishes,
Nick McWilliam and Trevor Jones.