Presenter : Prashant Pawar

Type: Oral

Objective:
In response to the consecutive droughts in Maharashtra, the government and people implemented water conservation measures on a massive scale during the last two years. People and policy makers want to know its impact. Has this led to an increase in water availability, soil moisture and vegetation at the local, district and state level? Objective is to make water related indices available on geographical and administrative maps using remotely sensed data and ground measurements.
Open Source GIS tools used in the research:
 Rasterio for reading and writing geospatial raster data and calculating zonal statistics
 Gdal_translate for extracting GeoTiff files from remotely sensed data
 Gdal_merge.py to mosaic a set of GeoTiffs into a single multiband GeoTiff
 OrfeoToolBox for calculating Radiometric Indices
 Gdal_calc.py to update the raster files for atmospheric correction and calculate averages
 Gdalwarp to assign WGS84 coordinate reference system to the processed file
 QGIS
 QGIS2Web plugin for creating leaflet maps
Methodology:
Hundreds of data files need to be processed. I programmatically process the remotely sensed data using GDAL library, python programs and open source tools like Rasterio, OrfeoToolBox. QGIS is extensively used for testing. GIS tools are also used to display the maps online.
Findings:
Effectiveness of water conservation measures can be reported at the end of 2017 using these maps. Geographical representation of water indices is very useful to the people as it can be shown on temporal and spatial scales. The availability of open source GIS tools and libraries makes it easy to build such systems.