GIS as a method for handling environmental data from Antarctica

• Main Author: Andersson, Emilia
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Industriell ekologi 2007
• Subjects: Social Sciences Interdisciplinary; Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Dronning Maud Land; Svea; Wasa; Antarc*; Antarctica; Swedish Polar Research Secretariat
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-32774

The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat wants to compile all data from the Swedishenvironmental monitoring programme in Antarctica and present it using a Geographical Information System, GIS, in order to get a better follow-up on performed activities. The assignment of this master’s thesis has been to build a database containing geographic information for the areas around the Swedish research stations Wasa and Svea in Dronning Maud Land. The geodatabase will serve as a platform for future GIS-applications used by theSwedish Polar Research Secretariat.The work is divided into three parts, project planning, project development and an analysis. Apart of the project planning consisted of a survey of the environmental monitoring programmeand the existing data. A number of shortcomings in the existing data were discovered duringthe survey, it was therefore decided to amend the environmental monitoring programme andupdate the data handling methods in order to get better-suited data to use in a GIS.The choice of GIS-software fell on ArcGIS ArcView 9.2 from ESRI and data from theAntarctic Digital Database was used as a basemap. Additional data from the Antarctic DigitalDatabase was used in order to build the database. A file geodatabase structure was chosen which consists of a number of feature datasets containing all the geographical information.An analysis and a discussion about the existing monitoring programme have been performed and proposals on how to improve the monitoring programme have been presented. www.ima.kth.se