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Edmonton, AB - The Government of Alberta, Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Development (AAFRD) was recently presented with an Award of Excellence at ESRI Canada's Regional User Conference. Alex Miller, President of ESRI Canada presented the award in recognition of AAFRD's Agriculture and Climate Information Service (ACIS).
"The need for climate and weather event information is critical to the success of Alberta 's agricultural industry," said Mr. Miller. "AAFRD has responded to its stakeholders by implementing ACIS as a public, web-based application. I am most impressed that AAFRD is able to provide near real time data that allows producers to make critical decisions in response to weather related events. This truly embodies one of the goals for GIS as a decision support tool." Business decisions for long term agricultural planning or responding to an extreme weather event require access to good information. Weather and climate data was always readily available to the agricultural community in its raw state. In an effort to make this data more available and easier to use, AAFRD developed ACIS. This helped their users by making it easier for them to make maps and reduced the number of ad-hoc requests that AAFRD received. "The need for timely weather and climate data for drought management was a real driver," stated Gerrad Vaillancourt of AAFRD. "The project started as a Drought Information Management System (DIMS) and grew in scope to include both climate and weather. We hope to educate and empower users with the implementation of ACIS." ACIS will have several applications to serve agricultural stakeholders: viewers that produce a number of pre-built maps from self serve query builders, and a viewer that will produces maps of near real time weather data. At the core of ACIS is a database of over 500 million records representing a 100 year period of record. AAFRD has developed a number of sophisticated QA/QC procedures that allows for raw data to be captured, processed, and deployed through ACIS. "The implementation of ACIS has had positive results for the use of GIS intern ally," said Arva Traynor, Head Resource Data Management Unit, AAFRD. " We are now serving 25 layers of data to the department. This award will allow us to continu ally build support for the continued deployment of GIS within the Ministry." About ESRI Canada: To receive more information, please contact: Media Contact:
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