Oral Presentation 7th Australian Stream Management Conference 2014

Big data concepts for Natural Resource Management (13103)

Nick Marsh 1
  1. Truii.com, Highgate Hill, QLD, Australia

The internet has become a valuable resource for data driven industries. Natural Resource Management is a data driven industry, and is well placed to make the most of government initiatives which publish rich environmental data resources that can now be combined with local data using online data analysis platforms. This paper presents some examples borrowed from the Business Analytics industry and applied to NRM to illustrate opportunities gained through leveraging locally collected data with larger government datasets via online community enabled data platforms. The basic approaches are firstly to embrace team based data sharing and management which produces a distributed approach to data management to empower all team members to be data custodians and data analysts (data democratisation). Secondly, the combination of data through overlaying and filtering of several datasets can be used to rapidly produce informative derived datasets. An illustrative example derived dataset is the combination of local water quality monitoring results with state based monitoring results, overlayed with a map of national species distribution and then combined with local maps of on-ground works. This compilation of multiple data layers containing both spatial and temporal data helps answer questions such as; What is the best on-ground works for our desired outcome? How have things changed? Can we benchmark our on-ground performance against the rest of the industry? Internet based data tools won’t solve NRM problems, but they may help us to get more mileage out of our data by combining public and local data sets.

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