Bass Coast Shire Council has received a prestigious international award for developing a system that helps predict the extent of potential storm surges, flooding and sea level rise.
Late last year, Council’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Data Systems Team was awarded the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Award, for their innovative use of airborne laser scanning (LiDAR), and high quality drainage data supplied by Rapidmap. The system was covered by Position Magazine issue #53, in June/July 2011.
The Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards are issued by the Surveying and Spatial Science Institute, together with the Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA), and recognise pre-eminence in the profession or industry.
The awards promote the success of high level performers from all facets of the spatial arena, including the public, private and academic sectors.
Acting Infrastructure Director, Mark Simpson, said the team has done an outstanding job.
“They have used technical software, systems and data to come up with a research tool acclaimed by an international science community.
“The system provides a way to predict what happens to waterways, land forms and foreshores as a consequence of large storm events and predicted sea level rise.
“Knowing more about the flow characteristics of our waterways and coastlines helps to inform future planning and land development for these areas. Bass Coast community will benefit from the leading edge use of this technology and the professional expertise of our GIS and Data systems team,” Mr Simpson said.
At the Council Meeting on 15 February, a special presentation of the award was made by Mr George Havakis, Managing Director of GISSA and Chair of SIBA, and Mrs Lynette Terrett, Director of Iconyx Spatial Technologies and Chair of SIBA Destination Spatial.
Bass Coast has shown that through collaboration of effort it has addressed a problem common to councils. Whilst determining the project scope also evaluating what processes and standards to review and adopt Paul Lennox – Bass Coast Shire GIS & Data Systems administrator said: “We needed to identify what the fundamental characteristics of the data that we want to collect were, so it could be used as a foundation for our project.
“The D-Spec standard specification provided us with the structure that we required for the collection of our drainage asset data. Our decision to work with the A-SPEC Consortium was driven by its open data schema in that it does not specify any one software to use but focused on the right data to enable strong asset management.”
The national A-SPEC standard is not a propriety software program. It simply sets an agreed national standard framework determined by technical working groups in each State to provide asset information in a GIS ready format that councils can use with whatever computer software programs they prefer. This flexibility also enables the industry supplying the asset data to incorporate into their current practices.
