Thirteen participants from state universities and international organizations have joined the course which is conducted by Ms. Colleen Curran, Project Officer of the Philippine Disaster Recovery Foundation.
“Recent events have shown that extreme weather conditions and climate change do much damage to agriculture and pose a big challenge to food security,” said Dr. Gil C. Saguiguit, Jr, Director of SEARCA as he stressed the importance of the short course, during its opening ceremonies.
“I hope that this training will help enhance your research, extension projects and study programs, to benefit more people in your communities,” Dr. Saguiguit concluded.
The short course will cover fundamentals of the GIS application – QGIS, an open source application for GIS and how it can be used for research. Ms. Curran will also discuss the Status of GIS/Geospatial Data in the Philippines. The participants will be given time for hands-on map making; data management; creating data from Google Earth; importing KML files to QGIS; geo-referencing; building rasters from point data; projecting climate grids using raster calculator; and uploading and revising GPS data.
This short course is the fourth of the series of short courses being sponsored by the Food Security Center (FSC) of the University of Hohenheim. FSC is one of the five excellence centers of the program "Exceed- Higher Education Excellence in Development Cooperation" supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) of Germany. SEARCA is one of the strategic partners of FSC since 2009. The course is preceded by the short courses on Agricultural Value Chain, Precision Farming and Water Resource Management.
