Construction of Largest 3-D Model Started

Construction of what could be the largest 3-D model to be ever built in the country, to represent over seventy-thousand hectares, commenced last June 20. The relief model encompasses the whole municipality of San Luis, in Aurora province, with portions of the adjacent municipalities of Baler and Maria Aurora included to serve as reference points. San Luis alone, which covers a big chunk of the Aurora National Park, has a total area of about sixty-seven thousand hectares.

Being constructed through funds from the UNDP-GEF-SGP and Misereor, construction of the model is under the management of PAFID in coordination with the local government of San Luis chaired by Mayor Mariano Tangson and with the local agricultural office headed by Maria Paz Llander. Dumagat volunteers, who are skillful in 3-D modeling spearhead the cast of volunteers coming from the various barangays to provide the needed labor. Four LGU personnel are also helping regularly in the construction which is expected to last for three weeks.

The 3-D model when completed will be used to settle ongoing boundary disputes among the various barangays as well possible disputes arising from the ancestral domain claims of about 5 Dumagat communities in San Luis who have been invited to determine and indicate their respective boundaries and land use plans into the model. The model will also be used for collaborative resource management especially now that the municipality houses a biodiversity conservation project funded by the UNDP-GEF-SGP and has just been recently selected as one of the sites of a future Eco-Governance Program in the province.

Construction of the model will proceed in three phases- raw model building, encoding of different land uses and other map information from direct informants, and color coding using official color coding patterns.

The largest existing 3-D model so far, constructed by PAFID in 2001, covers the whole municipality of Balbalan, in Kalinga covering an area of about fifty-five thousand hectares. The model is being used to settle boundary disputes which for a long time frequently cause bloody tribal wars.