 Satellite images supplied by MapMechanics are playing an invaluable role in helping the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) to clear landmines from Angola.
A set of images have been supplied by the company for the area around Luena, Moxico province, where MAG’s Angolan operations are centred. Its team is made up of 180 Angolan nationals plus eight international staff.
MAG, a neutral humanitarian organisation, has been operating just under twenty years, and has had a presence in Angola since 1994. It is active in 35 countries around the world, providing advice and on-the-ground support to local communities to help clear land mines from present and past conflicts. Its objectives are to prevent injury, release land and help restore the economies of affected regions. Its UK headquarters are in Manchester.
Geographic information systems have had a dramatic impact on the work of mine clearance, helping organisations like MAG to track and monitor their work much more accurately and consistently than was ever possible in the past.
“GIS has helped out work enormously,” says Evy Van Weezendonk, MAG’s community liaison manager for Angola. “It is an additional tool for our toolbox and helps us get far more accurate locations and sizes – which allows us to plan for more targeted de-mining operations.”
MapMechanics has supplied MAG with 60cm and 1m resolution satellite images of Luena, Moxico region, which is considered to be one of the provinces most affected by mines anywhere in the world.
Using the images in GIS has several benefits for MAG. At the simplest level, MAG says it helps to present minefields in their natural surroundings. It can show, for instance, the distance of the main population from the dangerous area, and can help illustrate the expansion of the community over recent years.
GIS also helps to add accuracy to MAG’s surveying work. As Evy Van Weezendonk points out: “There currently are no precise measurements available for most of the suspected areas in Moxico province. With new techniques provided by our GPS (Global Positioning System) compasses and laser rangefinders, we are now able to get the exact perimeters of the suspected area.”
This information is input into GIS software, which MAG uses to make exact maps and calculate the size of the area very precisely. “This work will generate a new baseline of information for MAG to plan and prepare operations,” Evy Van Weezendonk says.
Once the territory has been mapped as accurately as possible, GIS is used to record the progress of the de-mining work. GPS plotting is used to record the progress of the clearance work, and the terrain covered by the teams can then be measured very accurately.
Geographic analysis is also used to examine the locations in which mines have been found and show whether there are patterns in the mine laying.
GIS is considered so important to MAG’s work that staff members of the MAG Angola team recently attended a 12-day course in GIS in Luena, Moxico Province, which was funded by Adopt-a-Minefield and run by MapAction, a specialist non-governmental organisation.
In the course of this they were shown how to import GPS coordinates into GIS, make maps of mined areas, calculate the size of areas precisely and prepare maps for reporting purposes. They also learnt how to create “buffers” around communities to simulate community expansion, and create maps of safe and unsafe roads.
In recent months MapMechanics has supplied various geographical data sets to MAG, including 60cm and 1m satellite images of the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It has also supplied 1:250,000 scale vector mapping of Iraq, and 90m height contours and colour-shaded height raster mapping for the north of the country.
The landmines and unexploded ordnance in Angola are the legacy of a 27-year civil war. Information from the Landmine Monitor Report suggests that the country has approximately two landmines for every single person, and that 2.4 million individuals are affected them every day.
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