CITAS in China: A Report on Potential Collaborating Organizations William Lavely July 6, 1994 CITAS is well known in Chinese GIS circles. Last February in Beijing, when a delegation consisting of Roberta Miller, Harold Jacobson, Ken Lieberthal, and Bill Lavely made presentations to representatives of over a dozen organizations, most of them arrived at the meeting clutching a Chinese version of the CITAS prospectus that we had faxed to only one organization. Over the past several months Lavely has visited and corresponded with several organizations in an attempt to assess their data resources and their interest in a potential collaboration with CITAS. What we have learned is quite encouraging: (1) GIS and environmental sciences in China are receiving strong governmental support and are growing rapidly; (2) there is a wealth of socioeconomic and environmental data, historical and contemporary, much of it in digital form; (3) policy governing data sharing is in the process of liberalization, and collaborations with foreign organizations are actively encouraged. There is much more happening in China, and in the organizations described below, than I can readily relate in a brief report. Just a compilation of regional and local databases would be a daunting task. We have so far been unable to visit many other government ministries and provincial organizations involved in GIS and environmental work. What I describe below is the tip of the iceberg. The National Bureau of Surveying The Bureau is the originator of the official national digital map, the 1:1M Fundamental GIS of China's Territory. The Fundamental GIS includes terrain contours, elevations, vegetation, transport, hydrology, central places, place names, and administrative boundaries. This digital map forms the basis for 1:1M GIS work in the institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I met with Vice-Chief of Bureau Professor Yang Kai and Foreign Affairs head Professor Zeng Shengli. The Bureau, with its scientific sub-unit, the Academy of Surveying and Mapping, works in ARC/INFO. Until now, 1:1M digital data has been restricted to internal circulation. However, this restriction is about to fall, as the Bureau has decided produce an "International Edition" of its Fundamental GIS. The International edition will be complete within the next 12 to 18 months and, pending approval of an agreement, will be marketed through the U.S. corporation ESRI. The International Edition was described by Professor Yang as "relatively generalized" but still superior to the Digital Chart of the World. It is impossible to say how much detail will be missing from the International Edition since it has not yet been created. This is an important development for CITAS. The Bureau's GIS is the state-of-the-art digital map of China. It is crucial that CITAS gain rights to this map, because it is a "standard product" on which most other 1:1M map work in China is based, including the Land Use Map of China (LUMC). Other organizations use the Fundamental GIS, but only the Bureau holds the copyright to the base maps. Professor Yang notes that the Bureau cannot actually market the data or rights to it in a pure commercial transaction. ESRI will provide training and software to the Bureau, not monetary compensation. Similarly, any agreement with CITAS would, in form, be a research collaboration in which CITAS would provide training, technology, or equipment. Professor Yang expressed particular interest in hardware and technology for an internet node at the Bureau. The research arm of the Bureau is the Academy of Surveying and Mapping. I have had several conversations with the Vice-Director, Professor Chu Liangcai, particularly with regard to a research collaboration that would begin in the last half of 1994. In order to distribute our county-level GIS in 1995, CITAS needs to obtain rights to a digital county boundary file. To this end, we have proposed to the Academy a research collaboration on county boundaries. The aim of the collaboration would be to establish a dynamic GIS of Chinese administrative boundaries and place names at county-level and above for the period 1949 to the present. The 1990 county boundary file, provided by the Academy, would provide the benchmark data. Our agreement will specify county boundaries at 1:2M scale, with an unwritten understanding that this will be upgraded to 1:1M when an agreement with the Bureau of Surveying on 1:1M data is reached. The Academy has embraced this proposal in principle, although details of the collaboration have not yet been negotiated. CITAS has an additional tie to the Academy: one of their GIS specialists, Mr. Huang Jianxue, will be a visiting scholar in the UW Department of Geography in the 1994-95 academic year. Institute of Geography, CAS The Land Use Map of China (LUMC). This atlas was the first publication of national 1:1M maps data in China and was to have formed the basis for the CITAS GIS. We are still interested in obtaining rights to a digital rendition of the atlas. I was able to discuss this project with Institute Director Zheng Du and his colleagues. Professor Zheng explained that the Institute wants to give Griffith University permission to distribute the data within Australia, but not worldwide. Professor Zheng further expressed reservations about the methods used to produced the digitized version of the map at Griffith. Would it not be more accurate to digitize from the original materials rather from a printed edition? The Institute of Geography expressed interest in a collaboration in a digitization of the original materials, which presumably would involve digitizing only the land use polygons, since the basic map layers can be obtained from the Bureau of Surveying. 1990 Census county database and applications software. The Institute has a project, under Professor Liu Yue, to produce a public use county-level data set of the 1990 census. The dataset will include over 500 variables, and it will include applications software for retrieval and mapping. The data have already been acquired; work on applications software will take place over the next year. The data will be distributed on compact disk. State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environment Information System (LREIS). LREIS is a special laboratory affiliated with the CAS Institute of Geography, directed by Professor He Jianbang. LREIS also assumes an identity as the Department of Geographical Information Systems (DGIS) under the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC). LREIS is devoted to the study of basic theories and technologies of GIS, the development of new software systems for management and evaluation, promoting GIS applications in the study of global change and regional sustainable development. This lab was founded in 1985 and is headed by Professor Chen Shupeng. It has completed a National Natural Environment GIS at 1:4M scale, and a series of regional GIS projects at larger scales. These projects are forerunners of the current national key project to produce a national 1:250,000 land use map based on remote sensing data. This latter project is of particular interest to CITAS. It seems unlikely that China would release 1:250,000 national digital coverage in the near future. However, LREIS might consider a collaboration on a 1:1M land use map based on the more detailed map. This would permit the mapping of land use change in the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Although 1:250,000 national coverage may be out of the question for now, it is my understanding that local and regional coverages at this scale or larger could be shared, and there are several major regional projects at this scale. Current LREIS projects include monitoring and evaluation of major disasters; large-scale crop yield estimation, dynamic monitoring and macro-control of natural resources and environment; urban management and planning; GIS standardization, data sharing, legal and international exchange issues; basic GIS theories, geographical models, and expert systems. The Laboratory has been involved in a series of research projects involved with GIS and environmental science, including the monitoring and assessment of floods in the Taihu Lake region and response to flood disaster the Dongting Lake area. An important project is the Natural Disaster Information System, the main focus of which is on the financial impact of drought or floods on crop output. Historical Environmental Research. Professor Zhang Peiyuan headed a major project to chart historical climatic conditions which he described to us in a meeting in Seattle attended by Bob Hartwell, Peter Bol, and Bob Marks. He has hundreds of thousands of notices of natural disasters and other indicators culled from gazetteers and diaries. Under Professor He Jianbang, LREIS is developing a Historical Database of Disasters. This project will include climatic disturbances, earthquakes, and fires. One component of the project (under Mme. Chen Yufeng) is the entry of the 9- volume Compendium of Chinese Historical Earthquake Data (Zhongguo dizhen lishi ziliao huibian) published by the Kexue chubanshe in 1983. The compendium contains 40,000 recorded earthquakes. The project is entering the records on 16,000 that caused losses. The first observation is 2300 BC. The listing includes the date and place of the earthquake, the strength, weather conditions and other associated phenomena, the effects, and government response. Commission for Integrated Survey of Natural Resources (CISNAR, CAS) In the period of the Seventh Five-year Plan, CISNAR completed projects on the Yellow River Plain, environmental modeling, a Natural Resources Expert System, a Poverty County Information System, and a Mining Resources System. A major project in the Eighth Five-year Plan is a system to estimate grain output based on remote sensing data. CISNAR is a World Data Center (specifically, WDC/D) established under the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), and thus has a mandate to share data with international organizations. CISNAR maintains an extensive Database of Natural Resources of China containing information on land, water, climate, biology, minerals, energy, agriculture, industry, and urban economy. CISNAR has provided a list of its databases on resources, environment, and ecology. Library of Nature, Society and Economy of China. CISNAR has a major materials collection, directed by Mr. Chen Guonan, that holds national, provincial, and county-level data. The collection contains 3100 volumes of statistics, including 86 series of yearbooks, agricultural statistics from 1949 to the present, recently published county gazetteers, and some historical data. The collection contains over 3,000 kinds of specialized charts, 2,000 kinds of topographic maps, and 480,000 aerial photos. A large amount of county-level socioeconomic statistics for the period 1980- 1992 are already in digital form, including census data for 1982 and 1990. They also hold annual data on county populations from 1986 forward based on reports from the Public Security Bureau. The Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN). CERN is a major multi-institute project founded in 1993 by the Chinese government and the World Bank under CAS and lead by a Scientific Committee that is chaired by the head of CISNAR. Professor Zhao Shidong is the CERN Secretary General. The objectives of CERN are to "improve the quality of ecological research, ecological data, and ecological information provided to decision makers." CERN is involved with the gamut of environmental research at CAS and manages a number of field stations involved in studies on the structure and function of ecosystems, including projects on (1) the management and sustainable utilization of resources and control of environmental pollution; (2) regional agro-ecosystems, and forest, grassland, and lake ecosystems; (3) medium scale monitoring and simulation of regional landscape ecology: (4) global environmental change. One of the main components of CERN is an information system. This component will establish a distributed database system for use by researchers and policymakers, with data flowing via local area networks to a Synthesis Center located at CISNAR. According to a draft statement of principles and policies on data sharing of the CERN, "CERN will promote data exchange with other institutions and data centers at home and abroad concerned with eco-environmental research and will create operational mechanisms and a research environment favorable to data sharing and data exchange." CERN is described as an open network with data available to non-CAS institutions domestically and internationally. Institute of Botany, CAS The Institute is directed by Professor Zhang Xinshi who is a member of the CITAS Board. The Institute contains the Laboratory of Quantitative Vegetation Ecology, which is a nationally-designated "open lab." The lab has developed a raster-based GIS, written in Turbo Pascal, called "Ecological Information System" (EIS) which has an expert system modeling capability. It models vegetation-climate interaction systems. EIS is a GIS of China, mainly at 1:4M scale. It contains 100 weather variables for the period 1950-80 from 960 weather stations and data from the AVHRR a weather satellite. The system also contains a series of ecological indexes: biotemperature, Thornwaithe moist index, Kira's humidity/aridity index, Holdridge's life zone index, vegetation and land cover. Their software permits manipulation of these data. Pop-up screens show formulae and graphics. It is possible, for example, to project changes in land cover under different assumptions about precipitation, temperature, or atmospheric CO2. They expect to have a UNIX version by the end of the year. The Institute is working on a 1:1M scale vegetation map, and is extending the system by adding a layer on soil conditions, based on a digitized version of the Geology Academy's 1:2.5M Quaternary Geology map. The Institute also has a digital database of 30,000 plant species. Another database contains 6,000 "economic species" with detailed information on characteristics, morphology, and distribution by county. The Institute has ongoing projects on historical land use and vegetation patterns. It is involved in an IGBP-supported transect study across 1600 km of north China. Professor Zhang has expressed interest in working with CITAS on making the EIS more widely available. The Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, CAS This Institute is directed by Professor Xu Guanhua. The Institute has a number of impressive technical projects, such as the development of methods for merging remote sensing data taken at different angles. They have also experimented with the use of global positioning systems for gathering data in support of city planning activities. About one-quarter of the Institute is in a major subdivision, the Resources and Environment Section, headed by Professor Cui Weihong. It has an emphasis on interdisciplinary research on sustainable development, and they have several projects that involve demographic and other socioeconomic data and decision support systems. For example, they are developing a tools to produce county-level demographic projections, along with data mapping capability. One data set created by the Institute, certainly of tremendous interest to CITAS, are digital maps, based on remote sensing data, of historical coastlines, riverbeds, and deltas at various junctures over several thousand years. These maps are an update of those contained in the Atlas of China's Natural Environment, published in 1964, and classified "secret" (jimi). Deposits of seashells can be remotely sensed, providing evidence about the location of beaches in earlier epochs. This source of data is completely independent of the sources used in the compilation of the Historical Atlas of China. The Fudan University Institute of Historical Geography The Institute, under Professor Zhou Yilin, is the originator of the Historical Atlas of China. The atlas is laid out by dynastic period, with a volume devoted to each major dynasty. Each set of maps of a dynasty is based on a standard map which refers to a single point in time. For example, the Qing volume refers to Jiaqing 25, the year of an official revision of administrative geography. The base maps from which the published maps were created are of a larger scale and contain more detail than the published maps. The base maps are monochrome and could be digitized by scanning. The Institute is very open to cooperation on such a project. Rights to the atlas are held jointly by the Institute and the Chinese Academy of Social Science. The Institute has no experience with digitizing maps or with GIS, and Fudan does not have a GIS lab, so the Institute would need technical assistance on a digitizing project. The Institute is starting a project to produce a place name database for the Ming and Qing and would like to extend the project to other periods. China Population Information and Research Center (CPIRC) The CPIRC is a subsidiary of the State Family Planning Commission of China (SFPC). In recent years it has been moving toward becoming a data archive on Chinese population and society. They are currently mid-way through a UNFPA grant to archive and document population censuses and major surveys. The Center aims to become a service center on Chinese statistics, complete with on-line databases, and as such, is a natural partner for CITAS. I have had several discussions with the director Xiao Zili, Vice-Director Gu Baochang, and Information Project leader Li Bohua. We have discussed the potential collaboration in considerable detail, and both sides are ready to sign an draft agreement which makes provision for: (1) acquisition of a public use micro-sample of the 1990 census; (2) data entry and acquisition projects, to be specified; (3) creation of a county-level data set from the National 2 per 1000 Survey of 1988 (this project is currently being implemented at the UW CITAS office). CPIRC is interested in data exchanges, training opportunities, and technical interchange with CITAS and CIESIN. CPIRC has served as a valuable interlocutor with the State Statistical Bureau on the question of the 1990 census microsample. We proposed the creation of a 5% or 2% household-level microsample, with CITAS participating in the sample design, but SSB rejected the proposal. A 1% household sample is planned and will be made available eventually. SSB is the only data organization in China that I have encountered that seems to be less, rather than more, inclined to release data than it was a few years ago. Four years after the 1990 census, a 1% sample is still on the horizon; the 1982 microsample was released much more quickly. 7