Picture taken from The Ministry of the Interior's website
Taipei, Aug. 24 (CNA) The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) has won an Asia Geospatial Excellence Award for its achievement in promoting integrated land use monitoring, the ministry said in a statement Thursday.
The award was presented in Putrajaya, Malaysia on Wednesday as part of the annual GeoSmart Asia conference, and was accepted by Cheng Tsai-tang, a deputy chief of the MOI's National Land Surveying and Mapping Center (NLSC), the ministry said.
According to Su Hui-chang, another deputy chief of the NLSC, the integrated land use monitoring system allows authorities to compare satellite images obtained from different periods of time to identify ground feature changes and suspected illegal uses.
In the past, such monitoring was conducted individually by the MOI's Construction and Planning Agency, the Council of Agriculture's Soil and Water Conservation Bureau and the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Water Resources Agency, he noted.
To facilitate the sharing of resources, the NLSC has been responsible for integrating the monitoring work since 2014, he said.
Over the past several years, the ground resolution of satellite images has improved from 2-8 meters to 1.5-2.5 meters, and unmanned aerial vehicles have been used to investigate the extent of typhoon and earthquake disasters, he said.
He said a total of 476 agencies have been included in the monitoring system, which helps increase the reporting rate of land use violations from 15.4 percent in 2013 to 20.8 percent in 2016.
