An Integrated Approach to Amazon Research: The Amazon Information System

Abstract

The Amazon Information System (AIS) developed at Indiana State University/Indiana University is a comprehensive geographic information system that was created to catalog, query, analyze, model, and modify spatial data collected during long term Amazon research and complements new data in a project funded by NASA's Large‐Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Ecology Program (LBA). The AIS incorporates algorithms from sources such as ARC/INFO, ERDAS Imagine, Oracle, STATISTICA, and Visual Basic, and it allows seamless raster and vector data integration. Although the AIS was originally designed for just one of the projects in LBA, NASA requested that it be made available for use in other projects in this program as well. This will enable data to be shared among the various projects in LBA and provide a more synoptic view of the many changes that are occurring in the Amazon Basin. Currently, the system brings together land cover data collected since 1991; particularly involving species level inventories of secondary succession sites across five regions of the Amazon. More than two thousand inventory plots as well as soil surveys are integrated to a comprehensive satellite image dataset. The system includes algorithms that allow users to process biomass, basal area, and other estimators of vegetation characteristics. The AIS is continuously evolving as a result of new user requirements, suggestions, and requests. Because of this input stream, the AIS will be a very robust system that will benefit spatial analysis in the Amazon Basin for many years to come.