Public Institution Agricultural Institute of Republic of Srpska Banja Luka (JU PIRS) is a scientific institution founded in 1947. The basic responsibilities, mission and goals of the JU PIRS are research activities in the field of agricultural development (with the focus on general interest), i.e. affairs that have strategic importance for Republic of Srpska (one of the entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina). These activities represent the basis for effective and professional assistance to agricultural producers and improvement of the overall agricultural production in the Republic of Srpska. A very important role of the JU PIRS is the transfer of new scientific and technological achievements to all interested groups. The activities of the Institute are defined through the work of nine Departments. One of them is the Department of the Agroecology. The core of this Department is research and application of the results in practice within the fields of: Soil, Agrochemistry, Plant nutrition and Agroecology. The overall goal of the research is the improvement of Soil fertility (by achieving high and stable yields-in terms of quality and quantity) with the coherency to good agricultural practices and the protection of the Environment.
The Department of Agroecology in addition to the research in the field of proper nutrition of agricultural breeds and protection of human environment, since 2000 applies GIS. Due to the challenges in the development of the Department/JU PIRS and the rapid growth of the FOSS4G solutions/Free and Open Geospatial data, the Department of Agroecology has embraced those technologies and applied them in everyday work.
According to the Law on Agricultural Land of the Republic of Srpska, the entity itself, municipalities and cities are obliged to prepare a planning document “Groundwork for Agricultural Land Protection, Use and Restructuring (The groundwork)”. JU PIRS, i.e. the Department of Agroecology is legit to do such a job. Information related to the current state of land cover and land use are essential for The groundwork. The Department of Agriculture uses FOSS4G and Free and Open Geospatial Data to gather, analyze, process/elaborate and visualize land cover and land use data. The basic idea is to distinguish what is agricultural land and what belongs to non-agricultural land. Practically speaking, the following solutions are used:
1. The OpenStreetMap is used to distinguish the boundaries of the land covered with forest and water-bodies.
2. QGIS is used to visualize all geospatial data related to land cover and land use, to edit and delineate classes. Besides, the QGIS (with the GRASS GIS and SAGA GIS) is applied to process data related to soil fertility and agricultural land contamination.
3. Sentinel-2 data (with combination of available ortho-photo imagery) is applied in the process of the delineation of land cover land use classes.
Besides the application of FOSS4G solution in everyday job, the Department of Agroecology is transferring the knowledge to the final users using same technologies.