Along with the South West Catchments Council, we were successful in receiving a grant from the State Natural Resource Management Community Capability Grants (large) round.  We’ve just signed this off, and we’re about to start on some major redevelopment of our Geographic Reporting and Information Database (GRID) product – titled “Enhancing the capability of NRM organisations with Geographic Reporting and Information Database (GRID)”.

The grant includes a range of different tasks, including:

• Infrastructure upgrades – upgrading some of the underlying libraries behind GRID,
• Centralised data sourcing – we will be updating all of the GIS datasets in each of the GRID instances monthly until June 2018,
• GRID Mobile pilot – we will be investigating a number of mobile tools to see how we can integrate them with GRID,
• State GRID instance – we will be implementing a GRID instance for State NRM, for the smaller groups to use and to facilitate reporting,
• Linkages between GRIDs – so that GRID schemas can be easily shared and data can be synchronised between GRID instances,
• Project summaries – to help with reporting, additional project summary reporting will be created,
• Permissions revision – modified permissions roles to allow external groups to be able to share data between them in the one instance of GRID at project levels,
• Filtering – enhancing the filtering abilities when adding, viewing, exporting or mapping data within GRID,
• Symbolising by attribute – allowing for symbolisation to be set for a layer against an attribute,
• GRID training – one training session in each of the participating NRM regions at no cost to the NRM groups, and
• Project management – this includes monthly meetings with all of the stakeholders (likely via Skype/phone) and will report back to State NRM on progress.

This particular grant is the culmination of over a year of effort on behalf of a large number of people, (especially Steve Ewings from SWCC) which started back at the last State NRM conference, where we held a GRID roadmap workshop.  For the amount of investment from the community – and a considerable additional investment from us – this is a great outcome, which will deliver productivity benefits right across the NRM groups that use GRID in WA (which now includes 6 of the 7 NRM regional bodies in WA, plus now the State NRM body, and Project Dieback), as shown in our map below..

An interactive view of our GRID clients – this map is actually powered from data stored in our own GRID instance

A range of us from Gaia Resources will be involved in the project – myself, Andrew, James, Tracey, Jake, Tony and Shay – and you will be able to keep up to date with the project via our social media feeds (Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn) or through other blogs we’ll publish regularly throughout the project.

From all of us involved in GRID, we can’t wait to get stuck in and start rolling out the updates!

Piers