LUIS is a platform which enables the compiled storage of land use planning data at village and higher-level for statistic use, reporting and a wide range of other usage applications, for example LUP progress monitoring at project level or land cover change analysis between current land use and future zonation.
The uploaded data is securely stored in a structured and standardized way on a server with a backup system. LUIS provides an easy and user-friendly access to land use planning data through a web map which displays the stored land use data and additional data layers such as state forest zones, village census data & gender-specific information, with different options for a background map.
LUIS is a collaborative effort of DoL (Department of Lands), NRESRI (Natural Resources and Environment Statistic Research Institute) of MoNRE (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment) and DALaM (Department of Agricultural Land Management) of MAF (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry).
The LUIS web application allows statistic queries and generation of compiled report from the stored land use data. Certain filter criteria such as year of creation, applied methodology, supported partner organization enable the search of specific land use plans. LUIS is owned by the Lao Government and managed by the cross-sectoral team from MoNRE (DoL & NRESRI) and MAF (DALaM).
The land use plans have been created in different years, following often different approaches with different coding standards by the Lao Government agencies (PONRE, PAFO, DONRE, DAFO) in cooperation in cooperation with development agencies, such as GIZ, SDC/TABI, KfW/ICBF and others.
These datasets need to be standardized which is done by transferring the original land use codes to the latest land use coding schema.
The main responsibility for data integrity and data quality is with the data producer which are mostly decentral Lao Government agency at district or province level. To be able to use land use planning data in an aggregated way for higher level planning, reporting and statistics data quality standards are important. However, LUIS supports data quality assessments by different means, such as:
- Geodata quality checks during the data upload and checks in the LUIS web application
- Regular quality checks by the LUIS team based on standardized manuals & feedback to the data publisher
- Automatized back-end data cleaning procedure and instruction for data preparation/checking before the data upload to LUIS
The LUIS download section supports the dissemination of information and data amongst LUIS users. Land Use planning guidelines and instruction as well as general land use planning related notifications can be shared in LUIS.
The global gender data gap persists and our knowledge of the lives of women and girls remains insufficient to meet the challenge of designing policies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). LUIS has the potential to extend its current approach and data sets to promote and accommodate disaggregated data, and therefore offers unique and standardized insights on Lao women"s and men"s land use. Even though the platform as such is gender-neutral, its data and usage are not. With the extraction of disaggregated data, bias in regards to land use needs and capacities can be identified and corrected A platform like LUIS can fulfill the important role of integrating gender-sensitive data with traditional data, and scale them up to help monitor Laos" progress towards gender equality in regards to secure land tenure and equitable share of resources.