Title
Applying spatial analysis to the agroecology-led management of an indigenous farm in New Zealand.
Abstract
In Aotearoa New Zealand Māori land is often owned by communities and managed by trusts. Under communal ownership, trust managers are expected to provide for their communities in culturally responsive ways, using alternative land-related paradigms. In the context of Māori trust rural land management, geographic information systems (GIS) are seen as a beneficial resource to plan and support important decisions that have community-wide implications. For example, it is much easier to demonstrate visually the putative outcomes of spatial change to large numbers of people with the help of a GIS than it is to verbalise the effects of change. This paper reports on one aspect of such an application to a Māori trust-owned South Island farm, where a GIS-based multi-criteria analysis of terrain and proximity was conducted using also local botanical knowledge input to indicate optimal areas of growth for traditional medicinal plants. The analysis yielded very useful results, with positive feedback received from the local community. As well as the need to verify the approach empirically, there are plans underway to apply GIS in this way to other similarly-managed farms in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, in order to build a more comprehensive decision support resource for farm management, further plant species need to be modelled, and informed by a wider data set that includes detailed soil data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.ecoinf.2015.11.009
Ecological Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Indigenous farming,Agroecology,GIS,Medicinal plants,Rongoā
Local community,Geographic information system,Ecology,Land management,Environmental resource management,Indigenous,Computer science,Decision support system,Communal ownership,Agroecology,Aotearoa
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
31
1574-9541
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
2
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Antoni Moore174.31
Marion Johnson200.34
Janice Lord300.34
Sam Coutts400.34
Mariana Pagan500.34
Jeremiah Gbolagun600.34
B. Hall713321.11