Tropical Savannas CRC and AUSLIG to improve access  to map information for northern Australia

Ever wanted a map but couldn’t get your hands on it? Ever found a map but couldn’t make head or tail of it?

The information already exists for making hundreds of maps of anything from fire scars to the distribution of fire-tailed finches -  all of which could be very useful to land managers and planners in northern Australia. This information represents hundreds and thousands of hours of work by researchers who have painstakingly collected the data; but it’s wasted at present because it sits on computers as sets of numbers; raw data.

Making Maps Useful

Together with five other groups around the country, the Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre (TS-CRC) has been awarded a federal government grant to help get these numbers out of databanks and onto maps. The TS-CRC will do this through an Internet-accessible Clearinghouse of Savanna Information.

Information will be collected from across the north on fire, weeds and grazing management to make maps easier to understand and more useful. It will also have a special focus on three areas of the tropical savannas: the Victoria River District (VRD) in the Northern Territory, and in Queensland the Desert Uplands and the Burdekin catchment. As an example of how this will all work, you will soon be able to go to the Internet, click on a map of recent fire scars in the VRD region and then another click will get you background information and research about managing fire. The same capabilities are planned for the Burdekin catchment and the Desert Uplands region.

The other groups receiving grants are the Inner Metropolitan Regional Organisation of Councils (IMROC) in Sydney; the Herbert Resource Information Centre (HRIC) in Townsville; Airesearch Mapping in Brisbane; and the CSIRO Division of Marine Research, and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC). These groups will focus on other areas such as converting raw data into useful maps and images.

The grants have been awarded by AUSLIG, Australia’s national mapping agency, which is leading the development of the Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure (ASDI), which aims to deliver useful geospatial data to increasing numbers of users using distributed systems.

In announcing the grants, Warren Entsch, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, said the initiative "targets industry, R&D institutions, and local and state governments, and encourages them to identify and release existing, but currently unavailable, geospatial data holdings into the public arena."

"It will encourage a partnership between industry, research institutions and government, and make a major contribution to economic and social development at local, regional and national levels," he said.