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Projects
Hawaii Island Agricultural Suitability Application
SYNOPSIS TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH PROJECTS PRODUCTS AND OUTCOMES
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  • Geospatial technologies can inform agricultural land use planning, through modeling and analysis of core agroecosystem drivers such as microclimate, management intensity, regulatory context, market context, cultural/historic practices, and ecological processes.
  • In 2008, the County of Hawaii awarded a grant to The Kohala Center and the Redlands Institute for the development of a user-friendly agricultural land database/GIS tool for Hawai‘i Island. The County’s goal was to promote sustainable and responsible agricultural land use through development of (1) a GIS agricultural map database, and (2) an interactive, user-friendly, web-based agricultural land planning tool.
  • A key objective of this project was to improve access to and use of spatial data for monitoring, planning and managing agricultural land use by County employees for informed decision-making. The GIS database and web-based tools will enhance County agricultural planning process by facilitating ongoing agricultural suitability and production requirement analysis on County lands by TMK number or to smaller divisions where necessary. County planners will be able to interactively adjust and view results of analyses, so that lands can be managed adaptively, as new information arises. The project will support outreach by allowing County planners to expose decision-making rationale to interested landowners, farmers, ranchers, communities and stakeholders. The impact of this kind of decision support and visualization tool should be to defuse conflict and facilitate sustainable and appropriate land use.

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