Capacity Building
Developing Iraq's national AEZ program required a comprehensive series of training courses in GIS, remote sensing, AEZ methodologies, and related applications. The training was given to decision makers, planners, and technicians in Iraq's ministries of agriculture, water resources, and transportation and planning, as well as academics at the University of Baghdad and private-sector counterparts.
To facilitate training, ARDI established a state-of-the-art AEZ training and production laboratory in the Kurdish region of Iraq that included Esri's ArcGIS and remote-sensing software. Esri software was selected because it provided the most complete set of tools to implement such a complex spatial modeling project.
The comprehensive training curriculum included basic and advanced GIS and remote sensing. The courses were custom designed to provide trainees with hands-on experience with GIS modeling techniques required for AEZ characterization and spatial analysis training: raster analysis, interpolation techniques for climate data, surface analysis for generating digital elevation models (DEM), geostatistical analysis, and land suitability mapping using ArcGIS Spatial Analyst and ModelBuilder in ArcInfo.
Complementing the GIS and remote-sensing capacity building were crop modeling workshops, where Iraqi scientists and international consultants worked closely to define crop characterization requirements and land suitability analyses for Iraq. A key outcome of the crop modeling sessions was the adaptation of crop, soil, and climatic requirements into an automated land suitability model.