Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Environmental Monitoring in Central and Eastern Europe
Dr. Marek Baranowski has served as the director of the Warsaw, Poland, office of the United
Nations Environmental Program, Global Resource Information Database (UNEP-GRID), since
1991. He is a geographer by background and has worked with GIS since 1973. This office is
involved in many environmental projects in Central and Eastern Europe, which since 1989
have seen rapid change. Educational and learning resources prepared by UNEP/GRID-War-
saw have twice won (in 2001 and 2003) first-place awards from the Polish Ministry of Envi-
ronment for outstanding achievements in environmental science and development. He and
the office are also involved in several national and regional environmental monitoring pro-
jects, visualization for participatory planning, the Polish general geographic database, and
EuroGlobalMap.
GI and cartography are central to these projects. The educational and learning resources
use GIS to collect and prepare data; maps are central to the multimedia educational tools
used in classrooms across Poland. The coordination of national and regional environmental
monitoring involves GI and maps. Working on the Carpathian Environmental Outlook, which
is connected to the Global Environmental Outlook, requires the coordination of information
from the countries of Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Serbia-Montenegro,
Slovakia, and Ukraine. Because they need to show past changes, they must pay careful
attention to the seasons, time, types, and resolution of remote sensing data used to detect
changes. When we spoke, Dr. Baranowski told me that a previous project of the CORINE
Land Cover project in Romania once had to be repeated in order to recollect all the data on
the basis of new satellite images since so many changes had taken place between the start
and the conclusion of work.
GI and cartography have limits for showing dynamic processes. According to Dr.
Baranowski, detection of changes is the key way to show processes in this large area. Each
human-environment interaction can not be detected and recorded in an area where over 15
million people live. Detecting changes becomes complicated because of different data col-
lection issues. For example, satellite images collected in spring are different than images col-
lected in the fall. Large errors in the determination of changes could result when using
noncomparable images. Detailed technical specifications address these issues and other
concerns. The challenges of dealing with human-environment interactions at this scale
involve technology as much as organizations.
More information about UNEP/GRID-Warsaw is available at
www.gridw.pl
9. Can GI or a map be understood just by itself?
It may seem this way, but that understanding arises because of the knowl-
edge we have of conventions—for example, water is blue, north is usually at
the top edge of the map, and so on.
10. What are the differences between GI and maps?
Maps are printed or displayed on a media which cannot be changed nor
altered without altering the map. Maps cannot be altered except by destroy-
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