It allows input from a variety of parties, with different interests, and provides a report on how well a proposed MPA meets agreed criteria when trested against spatial requirements from all the parties.The proposed MPA can be modified and the test re-run to attempt to defin an MPA that best meets all requirements. It was (very successfully) used to enable the collaborative development of Marine Protected Areas (MPA's) in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. The Structured Conservation Planning plugin was inspired by a tool developed for the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries by Kim Ollivier. Users, or interested parties can contact NIWA ( ) if they have any questions. They are under continual development, but are available for use, even from an early stage of development. Some of the components developed by NIWA are implemented as plugins - optional extensions to QGIS which provide extra capabilities which users can add to their own QGIS installation if they desire. Everyone benefits from everyone's contribution, and the enhancements are driven and funded by the user community. NIWA and others pay for development - once the development is paid for, the software is free to download and use. NIWA funded enhancements become part of the core QGIS application - such as additions to the Map Composer which provide fine control over degree annotations on map frames and are robust over 180 o, so are automatically part of corer QGIS for anyone to use. It is an Open Source application, the developers and maintainers of these programs are paid for the work they do directly by users of the tools, so sell support rather than the program itself. QGIS is free - there is no fee to download or use it. NIWA has runs introductory workshops on QGIS, and on spatial data management with Postgis (a free, open source spatially enabled database application) in collaborations with Digital Mapping Solutions who provide a commercial software suite which includes QGIS. If you have a computer, you can "do GIS"!Īnother important part NIWA's programme for using free environmental data with free spatial software tools is education, training and support. It can be used by pretty much anyone, anywhere, like a word processing tool or spreadsheet. With current computer power, QGIS, and readily accessible spatial data from LINZ, NIWA, Landcare Research, councils, MFE, etc, GIS is no longer the province of a few technical experts. QGIS also provides an extensible platform for purpose specific tools to work with NIWA data, and NIWA is continuing to actively develop and enhance it, to better meet the needs of NIWA staff, with those enhancements automatically available to anyone, anywhere, who is using QGIS. As a desktop tool rather than a web based application, users are easily able to use local datasets, perhaps private or confidential, in conjunction with NIWA's data. QGIS is a free tool that people can use to access and use NIWA data, as well as data from any other agencies that provide their data using the same NZ and international standards. Making data available for reuse is only one part of NIWA's programme, equally important is ensuring potential users can find and use the data they are interested in. NIWA has established a programme supporting the New Zealand Government's policy on open data, using standards and protocols consistent with government guidelines, such as eGIF (e-Government Interoperability Framework) and the SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) Cookbook. Why is NIWA developing and supporting QGIS? Our Introduction to QGIS for NIWA (PDF 268 KB) is still useful, although it was based on QGIS v1.8. The current version of QGIS can be downloaded from the main QGIS website, for Windows, Mac and Linux, in 32 and 64 bit versions. NIWA Quantum Map is no longer developed as a separate application. With the release of QGIS v2.6 in October 2014, NIWA Quantum Map functionality has been merged with the main QGIS application, with additional functionality developed by NIWA available as QGIS plugins. NIWA's Quantum Map tool was based on an earlier version of QGIS. QGIS is a free, open source, desktop mapping tool widely used in research, government, NGO and commercial agencies in New Zealand and around the world.
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