Development spatial information system for supporting degraded land rehabilitation project

Abstract

Degraded land due to human activities should be rehabilitated to avoid further ecological and economical problem. Rehabilitation is a process of making a land useful after a disturbance. It involves the recovery of the functions of an ecosystem and associated processes of the degraded habitat. Rehabilitation will increase the number of vegetation, which has an important role in keeping the balance of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, which significantly affects the climate system, and then, conducting a rehabilitation project, small or larger scale will affect the CO2 balance in the atmosphere globally. In petroleum industry, rehabilitation project is intended to solve environmental impacts due to exploration and operation activities. Exploration and operation activities which require certain amount of open area for constructing any facilities, as like road, pipe line, well pad, borrow pit, and others, cause patches (fragmentation) within the forest landscape. Further, fragmentation causes decreasing on what-so-called as ecological integrity. Opening forest for facilities, in fact, brings impact in amplifying the level of deforestation, especially for the protected forest, wherein the illegal logger can use the facilities to penetrate more/deeper into the forest. Then, there are actually two different kinds of degraded land, the first is the degraded land caused by direct impact of petroleum industry (driven by area requirement for exploration and operation facilities), and the last is degraded forest caused by indirect impact of petroleum industry (driven by the illegal logger who uses the infrastructures built by the company). Rooting from the facts (problem) in forest/land degradation described above, a rehabilitation project should consider many factors, which may not be the concern in previous rehabilitation project. An integrated planning, which can give information about the appropriate location, which may give the good goal of rehabilitation, should be developed before conducting a rehabilitation project. Otherwise, it does not give environmental improvement, since it may be disturbed again and again. Any reference already stated that effort of developing the good or integrated planning can be facilitated by utilizing an appropriate information system. This will enable the rehabilitation manager or planner to obtain information (rather than raw data) to enlarge his/her perspective, then can define a high-consideration decision on rehabilitation project. He/she can choose the candidate of the "safe" area which gives more possibility to achieve success in rehabilitation, or can choose the appropriate treatment for such degraded land, by observing the detail information. GIS, as the kind of information system which does not only deal with tabular (usual) data, but also with the spatial, is likely to be the candidate tool for managing data required in rehabilitation project. It does not just answer the question of what or when, but further give answer also on