LONDON (AlertNet) - Aside from body armour, metal detectors, prodders and a strong dose of courage, hi-tech maps are now an essential piece of kit for teams heading out to clear landmines.
The British aid group MapAction - which provides aid agencies with vital information on the relief effort after floods, volcanoes and earthquakes - has been working with the Mine Advisory Group (MAG) to improve maps for their demining operations.
Nigel Woof, CEO of MapAction, told AlertNet that the same modern technologies and techniques used by the company in natural disasters can also help deminers.
"You need a means to identify where you're going to visit, to log where you've been and to record the information of what you've found there," Woof said. "A mapping system is absolutely crucial."
Data such as population density, wealth distribution, age and a range of other characteristics have become increasingly important to deminers and aid groups who need to plan operations.
Modern computer technology can now translate that information and plot it onto a map.
"If you can overlay data you have for landmines with human data then you can start to look at the problem in different ways," Woof explained.
Last year landmines killed over 5,000 people, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Now, using computer software and data from handheld positioning systems such as GPS, programmers can plot several different data sets on one map to help deminers.
The underlying information flow has to be good in order for technologies like GIS (geographic information systems) and satellite location systems like GPS to be effective, Woof added.
"That's true in natural disasters and humanitarian mine action."
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MapAction was set up in 2004 and has helped to chart over 20 natural disasters including typhoons in the Philippines and flooding in El Salvador this year.
In the last few years, MapAction has worked with MAG in Sri Lanka, Angola and northern Iraq.
The missions have so far been short and focused on improving basic data collection techniques with GPS and how to use the software properly to share and overlay information.
Sometimes the problem is simply that there are no maps.
"You just have a list of names of settlements and that's fraught with difficulties," Woof said.
With the new technology, satellite images can form the basis of a map and small pieces of information can be woven together into a larger-scale map.
That, said Adam Komorowski head of Africa operations at MAG, is very important to deminers' operations.
"It's like plotting a campaign across huge areas - where you go first, where you take your team," he said of demining missions. "You can plot a lot of that with the help of hi-tech mapping."
As well as overlaying different data sets onto one another and pinpointing the areas that need to be cleared of mines, there is also a strong financial incentive for using hi-tech maps - they impress donors.
They allow donors to see where their money has gone, which is vital to securing funding in the competitive aid world.
"You can tailor the maps in so many different ways for different people," said Komorowski. "Maps can support funding and support action on the ground."
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