Environmental decisions in under-resourced governments and NGOs are often delayed or poorly informed, not because of lack of data, but because of lack of accessible tools to process and visualize it. This talk presents one replicable open-source spatial methodology applied in two very different real world contexts: municipal conservation planning in Colombia and endangered subspecies protection in the Balearic Islands, Spain.
The methodology was first developed in La Unión, a small municipality in Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Using QGIS geoprocessing tools, including buffers, clip operations, and spatial joins, I built a workflow to identify priority areas for water resource conservation and biodiversity protection, integrating protected area layers, forest cover, terrain slope, and proximity to water sources. This approach is designed to be reproducible across municipalities sharing similar geographic and ecological profiles.
The impact went far beyond a single environmental study. Decades of municipal data stored in paper archives and AutoCAD files were migrated into structured QGIS databases, creating for the first time a shared spatial infrastructure across all municipal departments, environment, urban planning, agriculture, and territorial planning. Today, every department in La Unión's local government uses QGIS to make articulated, spatially informed decisions. QField played a key role in this transformation, enabling field teams and community members to collect georeferenced data directly, closing the gap between office analysis and on-the-ground reality.
Building on this experience, I am now applying the same open-source spatial methodology in a very different ecological context: island biodiversity conservation in the Mediterranean. Working with an environmental NGO in Ibiza, I am mapping the distribution of Podarcis pityusensis, a lizard with around 40 subspecies endemic to the Pityusic Islands, currently endangered by invasive predators such as snakes and feral cats. The same QGIS workflows are helping identify where populations have declined and where urgent conservation interventions are needed to ensure their survival.
One methodology. Two contexts. One conclusion: QGIS, combined with open data, QField for field collection, and community training, becomes a full decision-making infrastructure, accessible to any municipality or NGO regardless of budget or geography.