Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for land planning and surveying: the case of the city of Khouribga (Morocco)

Geographic Information Systems, together with remote sensing, represent today a basic tool for land management and planning and for the monitoring of the environmental critical factors of human and natural origin. Their use has been increasing in the last years also thanks to software and hardware development; therefore the use of GIS has spread not only into the field of cartography or land management and planning but also into other particular sectors among which there are the environmental and civil protection, geomarketing, social and economical analyses, agriculture, water, the exploitation of underground and overground resources, etc. All this testifies the relevance that this technologies have acquired in the more advanced countries: they give the chance of a complete integration of the available information, guaranteeing the possibility of immediate and rational decisions by assisting the operator in the data organization and in the comprehension of their mutual spatial correlations. In this paper, after a brief introduction to the geographic information systems through the definitions of their main basic concepts, we shall describe an information system created for the monitoring and the territorial planning of the city of Khouribga (Morocco), chosen as a model for the several environmental problems it presents. In fact the city and its surroundings are characterised by the presence of an intense mining activity for phosphate minerals and of extended areas in which phosphate waste materials are accumulated. These are a source of strong degradation, pollution and landscape alteration to which the competent local authorities want to find a solution.