SALB guestbook This page contains quotations received from users of the SALB database. Please provide us with your quotation by sending an email to: SALB@un.org if the SALB dataset has been useful for your purpose.
Jannet Bencure
AIT
This site really helps a lot for my thesis study. Thank you.
Helen Kerfoot
Chair UNGEGN
The SALB project is clearly relevant to the work of the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). Not only does it provide the UNGEGN secretariat with updated contact information for the National Mapping Agencies of the world, but also it is a tangible example of how the UN and other bodies need and use standardized geographical names in their work.
Pax MBUYI MUCICI
Chef de Departement de Cartographie, Institut Geographique du Congo
L'institut Géographique du Congo / RDC formule ses remerciements pour la collaboration fructueuse qui a eu lieu dans le cadre du projet SALB. Le travail de récolte des données , d'harmonisation et de validation des différentes cartes thématiques regroupant les divisions administratives de la RDC a permis de donner accès à une carte qui, nous l'espérons, sera utile à la communauté nationale et internationale. Notre souhait est maintenant de pouvoir collaborer sur d'autres projets surtout que nous allons améliorer la mise à jour de nos cartes et ceci afin de profiter les différents services sur le terrain
Debbie Fugate, Ph.D
Department of Geography, San Diego State University
"The SALB database is a vital tool for achieving progress on the geospatial analysis of demographic and health data. I have utilized some of the data for my dissertation research and other research projects, and I regularly direct others to the website. I hope the next round achieves greater spatial coverage that would allow more people to utilize the data. A very important tool for researchers, academics, and NGOs."
Dr Navin Ramankutty
Canada Research Chair in Land Use and Land Cover Change, Department of Geography & Earth System Science Program, McGill University
"SALB has been extremely valuable in my research on characterizing global patterns of agricultural land. Much of my work involves the compilation of global subnational agricultural statistics. One of the
biggest challenges has been to find consistent administrative boundaries that match the census statistics. Furthermore, we also have to deal with changing administrative boundaries through time. SALB has been valuable in helping address both of these issues. We used SALB as part of the AgroMAPS project (already described by Glenn Hyman of CIAT in another quote). We have also extensively used SALB in our most recent work on the global patterns of croplands and pastures in the Year 2000 (Ramankutty et al., 2008, Monfreda et al., 2008)."
John Miller
Monitoring and Evaluation/Roll Back Malaria Department/WHO
"We are using the SALB data set to standardize how we present reported malaria data from WHO member countries. SALB allows us to push for greater standardization for malaria reporting and translate received data into more efficient presentation of malaria endemic areas. National-level reporting of disease surveillance data alone, especially for malaria, is insufficient to paint an accurate picture of where malarious areas in countries are found. SALB is a fundamental data set for associating reported malaria data for a more accurate picture of the disease burden.
We encourage countries to work towards a standardized and digitized geographic boundary data sets and to establish links with current disease surveillance and reporting mechanisms. This allows better understanding of spatial distribution of disease, especially malaria, and improved decision making for disease control priorities.
We look forward to the day when these data sets are available for all countries."
Dr Simon Hay
Oxford University /TALA Research Group
"SALB data represents a huge effort to document and archive administrative boundaries globally. We have been using SALB information, coordinated by the RBM M&E team, to help standardize per capita measures of global malaria reports at sub-national resolution to investigate the precision of global population at risk of malaria predictions"
Glenn Hyman
CIAT
"We have been both a contributor and a user of SALB data in several different projects related to international agriculture and sustainable development. The data set and documentation provides a highly useful service to the international development community working in geographic analysis.
The data is being used in the AgroMaps project to map sub-national distributions of food crops (http://www.fao.org/landandwater/agll/agromaps/). We also use the database for our population mapping efforts in Latin America (http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/population/index.htm). In the future we expect to use SALB to link Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data to administrative boundary maps as part of the HarvestPlus project (http://www.harvestplus.org/)."
John Marinos
OCHA/ReliefWeb
"The ReliefWeb Map Centre has made use of the administrative data collected by the SALB project, in making our Situation maps. We find it helpful to have a reliable source of verified Geographic data."
Marilyn Salcedo
WHO Western Pacific Regional Office
"We are currently looking at the metadata, profiles used and the update protocol particularly for the historic changes in the SALB project. This is a useful example on how we can effectively manage our GIS layers in the future."
Monika Bloessner, Grace Rob
WHO/NMH/NHD
"The department of Nutrition for Health and Development (NHD) at WHO has applied the SALB codes to produce country maps presenting national and sub national patterns of child malnutrition. NHD is applying the SALB codes to also produce country and global maps presenting national patterns of iodine deficiency. In the near future NHD will apply the SALB codes for the production of global maps of national vitamin A deficiency and anaemia. NHD has incorporated the SALB codes into the WHO Anthro 2005 software developed to facilitate the application of the new WHO Child Growth Standards in monitoring growth and motor development in individuals and populations."
Christopher Legg
International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Geospatial Laboratory, Ibadan, Nigeria
"IITA works throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and we try to maintain up to date spatial databases of the sub-continent. Administrative boundaries are very important, since many governmental and international statistics on, for example, demography, food production, food consumption, livelihoods and malnutrition are quoted by administrative unit. The SALB programme is an extremely important contribution in this respect, and we look forward to complete coverage for Africa."
"UNOSAT is using SALB data for our full range of GIS and earth observation related activities. These include satellite imagery derived maps in support of natural and complex emergency operations, planning of early recovery activities, development projects, environmental projects and disaster risk reduction activities. The SALB data are most valuable as they contribute to a common standard for names and boundaries of one of the key aggregation levels for reporting. In addition, being cleared as official by national entities they facilitate even better use of geographic information products in the respective UN country programs."
Mark Falvo
Formerly of WHO Regional Office for Europe, currently with UNESCO Institute for Statistics
"The WHO Central Information System for Infectious Disease (CISID) has used the SALB project coding scheme to be able to geospatially visualize public health data down to the second sub national level. The SALB coding scheme was used as a base for the data being collected by CISID and the Open Public Health Infrastructure (OPHI)."
Douglas Schuster
Yale University
"I'm a graduate student in public health at Yale University, this is an *** site, I work extensively with GIS mapping systems and have found a lot of valuable data here. I hope to see the entire dataset completed in the very near future."
Dr Andy Tatem
Spatial Ecology & Epidemiology Group, Tinbergen Building, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
"The SALB database has proven to be a vital resource for registering, mapping and standardising census data for our work producing high resolution population maps of East Africa: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001298. Moreover, it has also been a valuable resource in aiding our mapping of the limits of malaria transmission: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050038&ct=1, and has become a central dataset for the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP: www.map.ox.ac.uk)"
Guestbook
Second Administrative Level Boundaries data set is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.