The Territory NRM 2020 conference will be kicking off in Darwin on 17 November, and Chris will be teaming up with Rohan Fisher and other members of the Northern Australia and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) team to present at a workshop on Day 3. This is the second year that Chris has attended this key event in the Territory for natural resource managers and conservation organisations. Last year he participated in the poster session showcasing our partnership with Wildlife Drones, and had a great time hearing talks about threatened species conservation, weed eradication programs and feral animal control.

The 2019 Territory NRM Conference featured a number of presentations like this one in the Darwin Convention Centre and the nearby CDU Waterfront campus (Source: Territory NRM)

In this year’s conference, the NAFI team will facilitate a workshop to look at recent developments in some of the important tools that land managers depend on for monitoring fires across 70% of Australia. The workshop will be demonstrating some of the latest tools leveraging NAFI for accessing and analysing fire information for NRM support. Part of that will be on their new Plugin for our favourite QGIS software (which we have blogged about previously), and our current project to develop a NAFI mobile app for Android and iOS devices. Also on the agenda will be the latest developments in providing sophisticated fire history analysis information through the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Metrics (SMERF) interface.

The NAFI QGIS plugin was released earlier this year, providing an easy to use interface to access fire information data products.

Those attending will get to see a preview of our “test” app development to date, and we’ll have a few devices on hand so they can play with a test version. We’ll talk about the future vision and invite participants to provide feedback on how they see the app being used in the field. These sorts of sessions are gold for us in the development space, because we can really get a sense of where the high value functionality lies. Obviously the true power behind the app is the NAFI data products, but we are really excited about  what this means for those who use them. So as not to give everything away, we’ll blog after the event to provide a recap.

So if you are heading along to the Territory NRM conference, tap elbows with Chris and feel free to strike up a conversation. Or get in touch online through on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.