The employees of the Prioksko-Terrasny biosphere reserve have been trained to use the new geographic informational system (GIS).

Courses for the employees of departments of conservation, science and environmental education and educational tourism of the reserve were conducted by specialists of LLC “NextGIS” who developed a project based on forest management materials 2015.

The innovation of the project implemented by the reserve together with “NextGIS” gives the opportunity of using forest management data not only in highly-specialized and licensed foreign programs, but also in universal geographic informational systems. It can significantly increase the value of forest inventory maps.

Work on the project included the data transfer of the forest management held in 2015 from GIS TopoL (Lesis) format in NextGIS-QGIS. LLC “NextGIS” developed for this a specialized exporter as a plugin to the GIS NextGIS QGIS that allows data transfer from the export format GIS TopoL (Lesis) in a GIS database format is SQlite, including the identification of data (layers). More information is available on the website of LLC “NextGIS”, http://nextgis.ru/blog/gis-forest-zapoved. The program and data can be installed on personal computers of all employees of the reserve, as well as digitizing pads to allow the conduct of orientation on the terrain, using forest inventory data directly in the field, maintaining a database, recording the results of field work and observations on digitizing pads in the field.
The preference for domestic-based development of software product QGIS with open code reserve is made to replace expensive foreign programs. It turned out to be a sort of import substitution.

The adoption of geographic informational systems with materials of the new forest inventory will allow the staff of the reserve to prepare high-quality maps and reports, schedule of inspection, research and ecological and educational work.