MiraMon, 30 years observing Catalonia from the sky
MiraMon, the geographic information system developed by the UAB and CREAF, celebrated its 30th anniversary in an event that will be followed by other activities during 2025. With more than 200,000 users in 42 different countries, this software is a key tool in Catalonia for monitoring changes on land. Thanks to MiraMon, a large number of PhD theses and key research works in the fields of geography, biology and climate have been carried out.
When we think of maps or cartography, the first thing that comes to mind for many of us is Google Maps. If we go hiking, we might think of the historical Alpina maps or applications such as Wikiloc. But, for those who work in any way with the land in Catalonia, managing, researching or studying it, MiraMon will probably come to mind. This geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing software developed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) celebrated its 30 years of existence on Thursday 19 December, in an event at the UAB Casa Convalescència in Barcelona. This software, which has more than 200,000 users worldwide, has been and remains an essential tool for education, research and land management, because it allows travelling through time, seeing how the land was in the past and integrating numerous layers of information, such as health and geographic data. This was the first of many events which will take place in 2025 to celebrate MiraMon's 30th anniversary.
“For 30 years we have not stopped learning, because everything changes and because our discipline is one of the most transversal that exist. Nor have we stopped teaching, because we are passionate about transmitting what we learn and discover. And we have not stopped observing society and the land, trying to provide valuable knowledge to public administrations, companies and interested citizens. We have been able to do all this with rigour thanks to MiraMon. Programming does not allow fickleness: either you do it right, or nothing fits. And if you get it right... You win!”, explains Xavier Pons, ICREA Academia researcher, professor of Geography at the UAB and director of the MiraMon project.
Thirty years transforming maps and satellite images into information and knowledge
Gràcies al DUCS podrem saber quins han estat els canvis d’usos del sòl de Catalunya al llarg del període de 1987 a 2022, que inclou moments molt importants quant a transformació del territori. Això ens farà saber, per exemple, quantes hectàrees de bosc s’han guanyat, quant abandonament agrari s’ha produït i quin grau d’urbanització ha patit Catalunya durant aquests anys de creixement. I, tan important com això, sabrem quan i on s’han produït aquests canvis.
During these 30 years, thanks to MiraMon, exhaustive studies have been carried out that have made it possible, for example, to plan and adapt public health services throughout the country through the Health, Social Healthcare and Public Health Map of Catalonia. This mapping served to project which health services were necessary in each corner of the land. A set of climatic atlases of the Iberian Peninsula and Catalonia were also generated, which served as a source for more than 3,000 international research works, and maps have been created to establish the ideal areas for cage aquaculture, a report presented and approved by the Parliament of Catalonia.
One of the most relevant studies recently carried out with MiraMon has been the Dynamics of Land Use and Land Cover in Catalonia (DUCS) project. This initiative, commissioned by the Government of Catalonia to CREAF and the Department of Geography of the UAB, will allow us to know how the land in Catalonia has changed in the past 40 years. Thanks to the DUCS we will be able to discover what changes in land use in Catalonia have occurred over the period from 1987 to 2022, which included moments of major land transformations. Thus, for example, we will know how many hectares of forest have been gained, how much agricultural abandonment has occurred and what degree of urbanisation Catalonia has undergone in these years of growth. And, equally important, we will know when and where this has occurred.
A 360 degree tool "made in Catalonia"
MiraMon is a much more complete tool than other GIS due to its triple objective, proposed since its creation: research, education and management. In the field of research, for example, MiraMon allows image processing integrated with metadata and other particularly complex analyses. For the educational world, it is a basic tool in GIS training in many degrees, master's and postgraduate programmes. For management, it is convenient and easy to use because it can combine data of different types in a particularly flexible way.
MiraMon offers a desktop version which is free of charge since 2017 for education centres and since 2020 for everyone. It is available in Catalan, Spanish and English and offers more than 1,500 pages of help in each of these languages, among which is a terminology treatment supported by Termcat. This is not available in any other software in its field.
In the technological field, MiraMon has the capacity to perform geometric, radiometric and classification processing (including automatic learning) of satellite, aircraft and drone images; it also allows lidar data processing and advanced spatial analysis with all types of interpolators, and contains modelling tools that have made it possible to generate solar radiation or species distribution suitability maps, to cite a few examples.
Moreover, it is a software with a sophisticated data model: it supports multi-3D in vectors, multiband raster with quality layers, graphic files and alphanumeric tables with virtually no limit in size or number of fields. In fact, MiraMon is practically the only software today with which true topological analysis can be performed, thanks to its explicit topology formats. It is also parallelised for more efficient computation when necessary.
“One of MiraMon's most advanced features is the standardised and automated processing of traceability, which ensures the tracking of all operations carried out. It is also equipped with what is probably the best metadata manager available for geographic information, integrated with the data itself,” says Xavier Pons.
“With all this, the software is more alive than ever and celebrates these 30 years with many future challenges and projects that will allow us to continue observing our land from the sky, an essential tool for rigorous analysis and, in the long term, key in these times full of challenges and information”, Pons concludes.