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General Provisions
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1. GENERAL PROVISIONS
1.1 The intended purposes of the GIS of water quality management in the Dnipro Basin on the Belarusian territory:
- to provide accurate visual information on water quality in the Dnipro Basin on the Belarusian territory to the state agencies managing the environmental state of the Dnipro Basin in Belarus, such as Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection and its divisions, Minsk city committee of natural resources and environmental protection, and Vitebsk, Mohilev, Minsk, Brest and Homel oblast committees of natural resources and environmental protection;
- to provide accurate visual information on water quality in the Dnipro Basin on the Belarusian territory to all concerned users including NGOs and international organizations;
1.2 Basic principles and special features of WatGIS creation:
- realistic approach to the establishment of the terms of completion, scopes of funding, technical and technological means of creation of WatGIS;
- computer-aided arrangement of the environmental information available for the Dnipro Basin within the Belarusian territory into a system best suited for the development stage of WatGIS;
- the prevailing course towards accumulation and processing of hydro-environmental information at the development stage of WatGIS;
- taking into account actual information flows within the systems of water quality monitoring as well as hydrological and hydro-chemical indices;
- the prevailing of the basin principle of the accumulation and use of hydro-ecological information;
- two levels of use of the system (at the second level of use WatGIS is operated by any users with the help of specifically developed user menu and well-developed system of prompts, this does not require any special training; at the first level the functions of WatGIS are expanded through the connection of other applications, it can be operated by the users who have had special training in their use);
- responsiveness to the prospective uses of WatGIS for the Dnipro Basin management including its use at the international level;
WatGIS has being developed by the specialists of CRIIWU at the Environmental Ministry of Belarus on the basis on the licensed software and equipment procured at the costs of this project.
WatGIS application was installed at the CRIIWU and at the divisions of the Environmental Ministry (the oblast committees and Minsk city committee of natural resources and environmental protection).
1.3 Requirements to WatGIS:
- any appropriately structured information can be fed into WatGIS;
- this information can be transformed according to the applied GIS-technologies;
- the possibility of data correction and data smoothing.
1.4 Main informational sources of WatGIS:
1. The published information of the State Water Cadastre on the resources and quality of the water of the national monitoring system;
2. The data of the State Water Cadastre obtained from the monitoring stations sited near the points of wastewater discharge of the industrial enterprises located in the Dnipro Basin on the Belarusian territory.
1.5 General requirements to the WatGIS components:
- the appropriate hardware (computers and periphery to feed in, retrieve, store, process, document and transmit the information);
- the appropriate software (for general and specific uses);
- basic cartographic support based on the selected GIS tools ensuring that the data are being fed into the database in the WatGIS formats.
1.6 General Requirements to WatGIS performance:
Informational support of the WatGIS project by means of updating of the database, regular control over the routine adjustments of the WatGIS operation, including the ones expected in the future, and upgrading of the software.
1.7 Requirements of standards and legislation:
Following are the documents used in WatGIS that are currently in force in Belarus:
- environmental legislation and standard-setting framework;
- the standards of water management and water protection;
1.8 The tasks fulfilled during the creation of WatGIS:
- the available information on the quality of surface water in the Dnipro Basin in Belarus has been reviewed and analyzed;
- technical task of the project has been developed;
- technical specifications for the software and hardware needed for the implementation of the project prepared, the software and hardware has been bought and installed;
- the core group of project implementers has been trained at a special training center for geo-informational technologies “GISproject”;
- the structure of the database has been created and the database client application have been developed;
- the initial hydro-chemical data on water quality in the Dnipro Basin have been obtained according to all measured indices (up to 56) from all 82 monitoring stations of the hydrometeorology department for the period from 1989 to 2002 and converted into electronic format;
- the application generating standard user queries and corresponding output forms has been developed and debugged;
- thematic layers of the 1:500 000 electronic map of the Dnipro Basin reflecting all major water management aspects (location of the satiations of the hydrometeorology department monitoring hydro-chemical regimes of the rivers, location of the stations of the Environmental ministry monitoring hydro-chemical regime near the points of wastewater discharge, the boundaries of the basin’s catchment area, etc.) have been prepared;
- first version of GIS has been presented at the workshop in Pinsk (Belarus) on 3 –4 October 2002 to its major users and has been positively assessed;
- the software has been improved to enhance the user interface, to handle import and export (conversion ) of data from/into MsExcell format, etc.;
- the initial hydro-chemical data on water quality in the Dnipro Basin have been obtained according to all measured indices (up to 56) from 168 major stations of the Environmental Ministry monitoring hydro-chemical regime at the points of wastewater discharge for the period from 1989 to 2002 and converted into electronic format;
- a program module that updates the database on the monitoring stations of the Environmental Ministry with the information of the State Water Cadastre;
- a user guide has been produced;
- the software has been installed and tested; the personnel of the Minsk city and Vitebsk, Homel, Brest, Minsk, and Mohilev oblast committees of natural resources and environmental protection has been trained in its use.
1.9 WatGIS soft- and hardware
WatGIS software consists of operational software, special software and applied software.
Operational software includes the following:
- operational system (Windows NT 4.0/XP/9*/2000)
- office applications (MsOffice 97/2000).
Special software are the basic GIS applications for graphic work stations: systems for collection, storage, search and visualization of spatial data of the research area. These are MapInfo Professional 5.0, ArcView 3.3, Dynamic Atlas (Dynamic Maps v 3.0, Dynamic Maps v.3.0 Service Pack), and the series of PERENOS applications, developed by the CRIIWU specialists to model transportation of the breakdown pollution discharges within the Dnipro Basin. Standard specialized software VisualFoxPro 6.0 was used to create a database client to provide access, process user queries, generate samplings according to them, etc. Dynamic Knowledgebase v 3.0 was used to create an application in the Dynamic Atlas environment, and Web Maps Server v 3.0 was used to ensure remote access to the database.
Applications developed by users as a part of the project include program modules developed with the use of general systemic and specialized software. Major components of these applications were developed as program scripts MapInfo Professional 5.0, ArcView 3.3 and VisualFoxPro 6.0.
WatGIS hardware consists of a modern PC with at least 64 MB RAM, 32-digit CPU, 20 GB HDD and the following periphery:
- SVGA monitor with the appropriate video adaptor,
- A3 size pad scanner;
- A4 size printer;
- A1 size color plotter;
- Fax modem;
Uninterruptible power supply unit(UPS)
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