In May 2007 the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (http://cbc.amnh.org) traveled to Vietnam and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic to train conservation practitioners in collecting and manipulating geographic data. A workshop was developed to support the monitoring of land cover, species, illegal activities and other information in and around protected areas. We used QGIS as the principle application for viewing and integrating workshop participant’s existing spatial data collections. Much of the focus of these workshops was on how to use a plugin we are developing for QGIS called eVis (The Event Visualization Tool). eVis can be used to easily view geocoded photos associated by attributes to points in the QGIS mapping environment. Point data can be any data type readable by QGIS or eVis can be used to connect to a database to build a new layer based on the results of a SQL query. Geocoded images can be loaded from a local disk or remotely using the http protocol.

During the workshops there was a strong interest in using QGIS to visualize monitoring data. Many of the workshop participants had never used a GIS and some even had limited previous computer skills. Nonetheless, the participants found QGIS to be an easy to use geospatial application. Having QGIS available in the Vietnamese language was also greatly appreciated. We will support the translation of QGIS into the Lao language later this year.

We have been pleased with QGIS and look forward to continuing to promote this application within the conservation community. As more functionality is added we expect QGIS will become the desktop GIS of choice for many of our colleagues around the world, especially in developing countries. In addition to using QGIS in our training we also encourage users to become active participants in the QGIS development process. We don’t expect a lot of people to get involved in the development and supporting work related to QGIS but even a few people can make a difference.

All of our training materials are available in both English and in the language of the country where we conduct the training. On site Vietnamese and Lao instructors were trained to conduct the workshop ahead of time so that they could be conducted in the local language, while we were available for assistance. We will soon have all of the workshop materials (presentations, tutorials, and data) available on our geospatial facility’s web site: http://geospatial.amnh.org. If you have questions or comments you can contact us through our comment page: http://geospatial.amnh.org/contact.php. The workshop and eVis development work are funded by a grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additionally, eVis has been partially prepared by the American Museum of Natural History under award No. NA05SEC46391002 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the Department of Commerce.