Geopalmascol: visor web geográfico para la consulta y visualización de cultivos de palma de aceite en Colombia

Abstract

With the constant advance of technology, Geographic Information Systems - GIS have become one of the tools that bring users closer to spatial information in an interactive and easy to understand way. In this way, the GIS facilitate spatial queries looking for timely, relevant and updated information with the main objective of facilitating decision making in front of different problems and in different sectors. Based on this, the success of the construction of a tool with a spatial component, consists of a previous analysis of the problems and needs in the sector of interest, as well as the design and development of the same, so that this provides a guideline for the implementation in environments that can be desktop or in the cloud. GIS tools have been implemented in different areas, one of them is the environmental, mainly due to the changing requirements of the planet in terms of conservation. Moreover, one sector that is related to this is agriculture and the need to have an inventory of oil palm crops in Colombia is becoming increasingly important due to its presence in areas of ecosystem value such as the Colombian Amazon, and in this sense, it is necessary to have greater control over the planting of this plant. In fact, this is only one of the many problems that affect the country in the environmental field, which is why the Colombian government has embraced various goals that seek to meet the Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs, among them SDG 15: Life of terrestrial ecosystems, which consists of sustainably managing forests, halting land degradation and biodiversity loss (United Nations Colombia, 2022). Thus, the objective of this work is to develop a web geo-viewer that allows visualization, consultation and downloading of oil palm crops in the country, thus becoming a tool that allows decision making by both governmental and non-governmental entities, focused on the protection of terrestrial ecosystems in the country. Therefore, this work consists of a theoretical review that supports its development, as well as the implementation of a methodology framed in the concepts of software engineering and Geographic Information Systems, considered fundamental for the usability and proper functioning of the tool.