Treffer: Development of a GIS data framework using open website datasets for the Niger River basin

This research consists on integrating hydrological data dispersed on the Web into a comprehensive GIS data framework. These data are extracted from a number of websites related to hydrological, water resources, and geospatial data. The study area is the Niger River Basin which total area isaround 2'000,000 km2; thus an effective methodology in order to manage and process this plethora of data is also applied. GIS technology is capable of handling, processing and integrating large and disparate quantities of data. The implementation of this Data Framework, based on open access data, will serve as a baseline for more and detailed hydrological studies through model assessments. Open source software is used in order to work with these data. QGIS and the GRASS plugin are used to visualize, edit, and perform some mapping processes with the data. There are a number of useful tools available for GRASS to do hydrological modelling such as catchment delineation. On the otherhand, Python is used to manipulate the data through file format conversion, or data extraction; forinstance, the conversion of text files into csv (comma separated values) files and then to shapefiles in order to visualize the location of meteorological stations and its attribute table. Finally, in order to do statistics and graphical evaluation the software R is used. This is powerful statistical software which allows doing computation on data frames or raster files, which are commonly used in this study. All datasets are affected by different types of uncertainties. Some critical assessment is performed on the available data by performing cross-checking of outputs of this study and past studies of the Niger Basin, and by doing some comparison of related data which interact in models such as the waterbalance. This data framework consists on an organized and structured hydrological based GIS data which can be used efficiently. In the future, this could be implemented in order to work in a web environment