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Project Goal
The O‘ahu Invasive Species Committee (OISC) is a voluntary partnership of private, governmental and non-profit organizations and individuals united to prevent new invasive species infestations on the island of O‘ahu and to eradicate incipient species. OISC spends most of its resources searching for and removing the highly invasive tree called miconia (Miconia calvescens). Native to Central and South America, this tree has completely replaced seventy percent of native forests in Tahiti. Miconia has unusually large leaves that shade out everything beneath it. A mature tree produces between three and nine million seeds a year. Birds disperse the seeds over long distances. Once miconia takes over a hillside, as it has done in Tahiti, miconia's shallow roots cannot hold the soil in place and landslides result. Miconia threatens O‘ahu's watersheds and our endemic flora and fauna. OISC's goal is to eradicate miconia from O‘ahu. OISC also controls fourteen other plant species.Business Problem Solved
The ability to calculate the remaining survey acres within our miconia search area and visually display the result is important to OISC’s operations from guiding our strategy to determining and conveying our budget needs. Our miconia survey strategy is based primarily on the biology of miconia and involves buffering mature trees for ground and aerial surveys, surveying streams by foot and re-surveying areas on a three-year rotation. Safety considerations include flying areas that are too steep or dangerous to survey by foot. OISC considers these and other factors and uses ModelBuilder to determine areas within our miconia buffers that need to be surveyed for the first time as well as areas due for re-survey in a given year. The model output is loaded onto PDAs running ArcPad to assist our field crew in accomplishing their surveys efficiently.
Technology Implemented
ArcGIS 9.2 and ArcPad 7.0.1
Development Team Biography
Meghan Halabisky, Ryan Smith and Mike Leech were some of OISC’s first staff and started the original GIS.
Jean Fujikawa joined OISC in 2006 as their GIS Analyst/Operations Planner after over 6 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Denver and an M.S. in Wildlife Conservation with a focus on ecosystem modeling from the University of Minnesota. Jean has expanded OISC’s GIS to utilize features such as models and mobile GIS.
