Two quick updates:

Curtin Schools Workshops

Last week most of the GIS crew were at the Spatial Sciences Department at Curtin University assisting with their Schools Workshops. These workshops are important because they allow high school students to get an introduction to GIS as well as getting basic hands-on experience.

The students were given an introduction to what GIS is and a number of examples showing how it could be used in real world situations including things like Google Earth and GPS where they may have already used GIS without necessarily realising it. From there it was time for some hands-on with ArcGIS where the students had the opportunity to interact with some simple data and explore some of the basic functionality of the software.

In the session I was in the students were really keen to explore the practical side of GIS and spent as much time as they could trying out extra functionality once they had finished the set exercises. This was really pleasing and  will hopefully lead to some of them going on to further studies in GIS.

WWF Australia Data Project

We have recently completed a project for WWF Australia assisting them with their revegetation work in the Swan Avon Region. The brief for the project was to create a number of new data standards and metadata and then in conjunction with WWF to migrate their existing data into the new standards to create a single dataset for each data type. In the past separate datasets were created for each individual project and this was making it difficult to manage data efficiently as well as making the distribution of the data problematic.

Having all their data in one place allows for analysis of the effectiveness of revegetation work and creates much better environmental outcomes for the region.

The data also now meets WALIS standards which allows for the data to be made available on SLIP.

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