Centre ValBio's National Director Selected for SCGIS Global Scholarship Program

In April 2023, the Society for Conservation GIS selected CVB’s National Director Pascal Rabeson to participate in their Global Scholarship Program, a month-long training in the latest Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. Pascal is the current president of the SCGIS Madagascar Chapter, having previously been an SCGIS Scholar in 2014. For him, the opportunity to reconnect with other alums and freshen up his GIS skills was a welcome one. “After [participating in] the Global Scholarship Program in 2014, I felt I was at the stage where I could use GIS for mapping,” says Pascal. “Now, I want to be able to go further with the analysis. It’s really the analysis and forecasting abilities of GIS technologies that I find the most useful.”  

Around the world, governmental, health, and environmental agencies use GIS software like ArcGIS and QGIS to inform policies and management plans. As National Director, Pascal has used GIS in the past to help map CVB’s health, education, and restoration ecology outreach in the Ranomafana region, to counter illegal activities within Ranomafana National Park’s boundaries, and to train new rangers in mapping the Ivohiboro Protected Area, a new CVB research site. 

This year’s training took Pascal and the other SCGIS Scholars to the University of California, Davis, where they spent their first week learning about the newest updates to ArcGIS Pro. Pascal was no stranger to California, having spent extensive time conducting ant research at the California Academy of Sciences before joining CVB. Returning to the USA, he said, granted him the exciting opportunity to reconnect with his host family from 2014. The group then traveled to San Diego, where they attended Esri’s User Conference, the largest annual event dedicated to GIS technology. “It was a very important event for me because it was an opportunity to meet the experts from Esri…talk with them one-on-one…and attend different presentations in a number of different domains,” says Pascal. The training finished with a week of training in ArcGIS Online, a web-mapping software that Pascal believes is the future of GIS due to its accessibility and collaborative abilities. His final project was a StoryMap visualizing how CVB combines health and education projects into its conservation work around Ranomafana National Park. “I wanted to highlight that it’s not just the biodiversity we preserve, but that we integrate the wellbeing of the people living here through environmental education and reforestation projects,” he says.

While in California, Pascal was already thinking about how to take what he was learning and apply it to his work in Madagascar—especially regarding CVB’s ongoing Prolemur simus project. This past year, CVB translocated a group of critically endangered greater bamboo lemurs (Prolemur simus) from a degraded forest fragment in southeast Madagascar to Ranomafana National Park. Months after their release into the park, however, most individuals had either left the park boundary or didn’t survive. “I remember discussing several hypotheses about the outcome of the project,” Pascal says. “Was it food? Was it the habitat? Why did they leave this place?” Using GIS, Pascal hopes to understand better the habitat requirements of the few remaining Prolemur simus populations in Madagascar, to improve their chances of recovery in situ. “If we gather all the data from Madagascar on where [the lemurs] are located and what kind of habitats they live in, we could do a habitat suitability analysis and create a map showing priority habitats for conservation,” Pascal says. “Visualizing this data would be useful for convincing authorities to protect these places.”

In reflecting on his first exposure to GIS in 1999, during his master’s degree at the University of Georgia, USA, Pascal recalls feeling that it was something he would never be able to learn. Now, as President of SCGIS-Madagascar, he works hard to make GIS an accessible tool to other Malagasy researchers and professionals. Pascal hopes to continue sharing his knowledge by creating a training center within CVB. Taught by himself and members of the SCGIS-Madagascar Chapter, he envisions this project improving the capacity of Malagasy institutions, NGOs, and researchers to apply mapping and spatial analysis skills to solving critical issues across sectors in Madagascar.