Winners
Geoscience Australia, FrontierSI & Australian Hydrographic Office
Award for Technical Excellence
Designed through consultation with the AusSeabed community, the **Survey Coordination Tool** (SCT) includes three functions: upcoming survey registration and planning, demarcation of priority mapping areas, and the capacity to generate survey requests for submission to the Australian Hydrographic Office. SCT is open-source, and the underlying code has been published alongside other AusSeabed infrastructure in the AusSeabed GitHub code repository. The tool represents the first suite of technological solutions intended to support the marine community in developing a consistent approach to the capture of seabed mapping data.
DITRDC, Geoplex & Transport Certification Australia
Award for Spatial Enablement
The National Freight Data Hub (NFDH) prototype website features interactive insights and uses cutting-edge geospatial visualisation tools for industry and governments to gain a national picture of Australia’s freight movements. It showcases how to make better use of current data to answer enduring industry questions such as what freight is being moved, when, and where. The website contains time-enabled maps and graphs, and is the first publicly searchable freight data directory for Australia. The NFDH was custom-developed by Geoplex, through an agile and rapid prototyping approach with the Australian Federal Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications.
Krystal Dacey
Undergraduate Student Award
My honours research project has created a spatially referenced Agent-Based Model to improve search outcomes for lost people. The model incorporates the lost person’s behaviour and their interaction with underlying terrain and environmental spatial data to model the most probable areas they may be located to assist in the strategic planning of search areas by search and rescue professionals.
Aerometrex
Innovation Award - Medium to Large Business
Project: Greening Melbourne. In high-density cities, rooftops and facades represent significant available surface area. A growing number of cities are exploring new ways to renew unused spaces by developing green recreational rooftops, green facades and vertical greening to increase health and environmental benefits. The City of Melbourne is committed to becoming carbon-neutral and is progressing several initiatives underway to improve the quality and quantity of green roofs and vertical greening. Aerometrex is helping the City of Melbourne to leverage multiple 3D geospatial datasets to ensure relevant information and data is available to deliver a more sustainable, greener and climate resilient City.
Land Use Victoria, DELWP & Spatial Services, DCS
Technical Excellence
Project: NSW-Vic Border Spatial Representation ProjectThe location of State borders and their spatial representation is something that until recently very few people ever gave much consideration. Most people would be shocked to realise that despite the NSW-Victorian border being created in 1851 there is still some ambiguity surrounding its location. The teams from Surveyor-General Victoria and Office of the Surveyor-General NSW utilised a variety of historical and modern surveying information and technology to develop a single line spatial representation of the NSW-Victoria State Border.
North East Water & 1Spatial
Spatial Enablement
Project: ACDC Validation Portal. The As Constructed drawing validation portal allows internal and external consulting engineers the ability to download existing network infrastructure and then validate the drawings provided to North East Water against spatial and a-spatial business rules, required to efficiently import into the ESRI network utility model. The portal has significantly reduced the amount of GIS resources required to get drawings into a validated state, and allows consultants immediate feedback on errors.
DELWP, FrontierSI & Orbica
Environment and Sustainability
Project: Vicmap Vegetation. DELWP’s Land Information and Spatial Services partnered with FrontierSI to refresh the state-wide Vicmap Vegetation dataset. The more than 20-year old dataset no longer reflected vegetation extent across the state. In a Victorian-first, a machine learning feature extraction process was combined with aerial imagery and elevation data to extract and classify vegetation. The outcome is three new products: a tree extent, tree density and a tree ledger. The 2,500-fold improvement in resolution of the new Vicmap Vegetation (from 10m to 20cm) showcases the power of combining high resolution remote sensing data with emerging machine learning techniques for environmental mapping.
Nicole Kiely
Diversity and Inclusion Award
Nicole has been working in the spatial industry for 13 years and is a passionate advocate and is actively working to promote inclusion and improve the diversity of her workplace and industry. Nicole’s advocacy for women’s involvement and engagement in the spatial industry was fostered by the remarkable mentors she had as a graduate upon entering the workforce. Nicole was lucky enough to work directly with an array of senior spatial women in people, technical, and project leadership roles. This instilled in her a desire to ensure that all graduates, particularly women, experience the benefits of diversity in leadership.
Kellie Dean
Professional of the Year
Kellie is one of only 16 women licensed surveyors practicing in Victoria. This has not prevented her from taking leadership roles and changing the direction for the surveying profession. The first women to become the President of the Institution of Surveyors, Victoria, in the almost 150 year history of the organisation, Kellie has used her position to progress the profession towards better gender balance and diversity. Her leadership continues beyond the ISV Presidency with encouragement of women to become involved in professional life and has become a convenor of the Space, Spatial and Surveying Diversity Leaders Network.
Jason Heritage
Future Leader of the Year
Jason Heritage is a data analyst on Victoria's Digital Cadastre Modernisation Project that is improving the accuracy of parcel boundary mapping, integrating other datasets and automating aspects of plan examination. He loves the combination of data, mathematics and surveying. Jason as an active member of the SSSI YP's worked closely with Roshni Sharma setting up the Mentoring Program.
Harry Wade
Vocational Education Training (VET) Student Award
Following his uncle's footsteps, a surveyor in the UK for 20 years, Harry is currently studying the Advanced Diploma of Surveying at RMIT University after completing the Diploma of Surveying in 2020. He is a hardworking, organized and a friendly person who is eager to learn. He is currently a Junior Survey Assistant at JCA Land Consultants where his characteristic enthusiasm is by no doubt contagious. Harry aspires to continue in Higher Education at RMIT to be able to graduate as a graduate surveyor and enter a training agreement to become a licensed surveyor.
Xiaoji Shen
Postgraduate Student Award
Current L-band passive microwave remote sensing technology can only obtain soil moisture within the top 5-cm layer of soil, hindering its use in a range of applications. Moreover, these data are adversely affected by the overlaying vegetation layer and the roughness of the soil surface. Accordingly, my research has assessed the utility of using passive microwave observations at P-band. Through a series of tower-based experiments with different roughness configurations and vegetation conditions I have successfully demonstrated that these longer wavelength observations not only achieve a sensing depth of 10-15 cm but are also less affected by roughness and vegetation.