Report writing and management is one of the main tasks of the staff of the Zona Volcānica de la Garrotxa Natural Park (ZVGNP). It approximately takes a third of their working time. According to Catalan legislation reports must be prepared for many sorts of human activities and uses within the park, from forest management practices carried out by individual owners to road maintenance performed by the responsible road management authority. ZVGNP is a protected landscape, that is a category V protected area under the classification of IUCN, in which live more than 25000 people who live on industry, agriculture and tourism.
A GIS for the management and planning of the park has been under development since 1995, under the name of Vulcanus Project. This system is aimed at providing the parks staff with a tool that can both enhance and make more efficient their management and planning tasks and should encompass the whole parks scope of action. System design is based upon different modules which address different aspects of park management. One of these modules is that of report handling and management. This module is different from other modules such as the forest and vegetation management or the fauna management in that it cuts across all modules. Reports are written for uses and activities dealing with any aspect of park management and are the responsibility of every member of the parks staff.
When designing and implementing the report management module some constraining factors had to be taken into account. First, the way in which the module operates necessarily must comply with the predefined circuit of report handling and writing which already existed in the park and which was also included in the procedures approved by the certification team which gave the ISO 9002 certification to the park. Adaptation to the established procedures implies that the system must be able to operate from any desktop computer of any park staff member.
Second, the system should provide a way to store and update information on an instant basis, that is, access to information continuously updated should be possible. Third, access to all documents that were written for a given report (texts, spreadheets, maps, etc.) should be allowed both from the alphanumerical database and from the graphical database. And fourth, the system should provide also a way to analyze report management in the park and thus answer questions such as the number of reports written from e.g. 1996 to 1998 that approved the openning of forest cutting roads in a given area of the park, etc.
MiraMon, a general purpose GIS developed at the Centre for Ecological
Research and Forestry Applications at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona, has been chosen as the system to implement the GIS of the
park. It has proved very useful for implementing the different modules
of park management, specially the report management module. By combining
the GIS with database management systems, office applications and HTML
browsers it has been possible to implement a report management module
that meets the design constraints outlined above. The time used to write
reports and their accompanying maps has been greatly reduced while also
providing a powerful tool for querying and analyzing the new graphical
and alphanumerical report database of the park. Instant information on
the status of each report being written can easily be consulted with an
HTML browser from any computer of the parks LAN. The report management
module has been successfully used since the 1st of January, 1999.