The CANRI program concludes in June 2004. Some maintenance resources will be required if the many valuable products and services developed under the Program are to remain available and functional into the future.

This project will investigate and report on the resourcing requirements and options for maintaining the CANRI framework and the products and services it supports. Once preferred options have been selected by participating agencies, Service Level Agreements will be prepared for signature. Documentation and training will be developed where needed.

The objectives of this project are to communicate the existence of the CANRI program products and interact with the community to better meet their needs in relation to sharing and using natural resources data, products and services.

The CANRI Program is not widely known. It is not clearly explained and its usefulness is even less understood. To address this the CANRI website is being redesigned. It needs a new communication strategy to gather a new audience and recapture those that have ceased to use the site.

This will be achieved through the development of case studies based on CANRI products, delivery of regional training and training products, publicity material, presentations to key stakeholders and a launch of the new integrated CANRI website.

The CANRI program in it’s final year has developed this project to deliver training and training products for web mappining product managers & data custodians, particlarly those that sit outside of government.

The training material will be developed and first applied at NCC, but made generically applicable and available to all. This project will also ensure the sustainability of the NCC web-mapping facility that enables its 130 member groups to upload their own collected data and combine it with other data sources.

Activities will include a two day train-the trainer workshop in Sydney, an on-line tutorial and sand-pit for real-time publishing.

The "one-stop-shop" concept has been adopted in many government situations where information is spread across many agencies which over complicates the community (user) experience. Useability experts the Hiser Group conducted a study of user experiences of government websites (www.hiser.com.au/world/news/releases/mr20030623.htm). The finding was that users became frustrated moving from site to site, and greater cross-linking of government sites was required.

This project aims to ensure that CANRI is linked into all relevant government website pages where appropriate.

This project will deliver a regional web mapping application for the Southern Catchment Management Board (SCMB), and a pilot portal to investigate options for presenting Blueprint progress reports on the Internet.

The Catchment Blueprints are the major delivery mechanism for federal and State government funding for natural resource management in NSW (www.dlwc.nsw.gov.au/care/cmb/blueprints). The information required to research, plan, monitor and report on Catchment Blueprints has been identified as a priority for government. No less important, the Catchment Management Boards, those charged with developing the Blueprints, have a real need to inform their stakeholders on Blueprint progress and to provide information about natural resources relevant to their catchments.

The regional web mapping portal to be developed for the Southern CMB will reflect the issues covered in their Catchment Blueprint. These "priority" issues will cov…[more]

The CANRI framework comprises a number of distributed components working together through adherence to agreed interoperability standards. This project will extend the CANRI DIY Manual with a collection of documentation on the standards used in CANRI. These include OpenGIS standards, but also metadata standards, guidelines for web mapping and some data models. The project will also evaluate the implementation of these standards across the framework.

The project will deliver web-based interactive keys on several beetle groups for New South Wales – Leaf Beetles and Stag Beetles. The keys will be produced in LUCID software. The products will be delivered through the CANRI framework. The keys will be presented in user-friendly format so that they will be of use to a wide range of stakeholders, including professional scientists, environmental groups, and landholders.

A review will be undertaken of all core and priority datasets, ie current and proposed datasets served or downloaded through CANRI to assess and remediate the quality and usability of the data and associated metadata from the user perspective. The review of metadata will focus on ease of discovery (including appropriateness of selected search words) and the quality of information provided in order to determine suitability for use. Issues associated with the quality of available data will also be identified and addressed.

The Museum’s Fauna Collections have large numbers of species that cannot be mapped as part of FaunaNet.This project will harvest names from the Australian Museums Fauna Collections and the literature and include them in the NSW Fauna Master Names List.

The current statewide digital geology database has been developed to provide information for geological professionals, such as university and mineral exploration industry. In order for the general community to utilise this technical information, a process is necessary to make this information more useable by translating it into plain English to enable people without formal geological training to understand it. This process will involve sorting data to suit general inquires and replace descriptive texts with more generic texts. As this project progresses, it will also be able to provide best available coverage for the state by incorporating more detailed (1:100K and 1:50K) mapping data into the database.

The CANRI RAMS Far West Data Remediation Project builds on the multiagency Resource Assessment & Monitoring System (RAMS) Far West long term monitoring program. The original collaborative program has been using satellite imagery to monitor and map the clearing and cropping activities, annually, within the NSW Western Division at a paddock scale since the early 1980s. The CANRI Far West Data Remediation project has been, and will continue to, appraise the database’s overall integrity and reliability, correct GIS topological and misclassification errors in this extensive database, patch a number of temporal gaps, and deliver a set of a generalised grids to the public domain through the CANRI webmapping structure. In general, the project will continue the process of validating the database to provide reliability appropriate for dissemination to the public.

Angler’s Oracle will be a ‘one stop shop’ for information of interest to recreational anglers. A map interface will give access to primary datasets/informationsuch as; stocking locations, species & numbers, river/estuary access points (boat ramps, public lands etc), regulations x locality, likely species, declared special management areas (trout waters, fishing havens etc). Links to currently available information (eg. regional fishing guides) will also be incorporated.

The Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources’ (DIPNR) Rangeland Assessment Program (RAP) has been collecting data from a network of sites since 1989. The program represents the State’s sole effort to monitor long term change in the semi-arid rangelands of NSW. Data are collected annually from approximately 350 sites located in seven major rangetypes throughout western NSW. The program aims to increase our understanding of semi-arid ecosystems and promote sustainable land management through the provision of advice to land planners, administrators, policy makers and practitioners. Spatial and textual data on vegetation composition, abundance and biomass is collected along with soil surface condition and a range of site attributes including soil, fire history, rainfall, total grazing pressure and landholder observations. Data can be amalgamated to be presented at a number of spatial scales – rangetype, Interim Biographic Regionalisation of …[more]

The DIPNR has information from 90,000 bores in its groundwater database.This project will deliver information about the location, lithology, construction and other relevant details of these bores to the public using the CANRI framework

This project will enable the species collections data being served currently via the BioNet application, to be served through to the public via the CANRI framework.

This project will undertake remaining priority actions required to achieve a stable, maintainable technical framework that will continue to support CANRI’s existing products/services into the future.

The CANRI technology framework has grown over five years with the addition of new data and products, the improvement of existing ones and the adoption of new interoperability standards and technology platforms. In response to focus group testing and user feedback, the CANRI Site Redesign 2002-03 project implements a new catalog design to support a new user interface to present content in a more user-friendly and scalable fashion.

Following completion of the Site Redesign in October 2003, further work will be required to ensure the back-end processes behind the site are stable, maintainable and as future-proof as possible. The exact nature of this work will be defined following a review of the Site Redesign outcomes …[more]

Improve the stability of IT infrastructure & functionality of PlantNET for on-going web-access and improving linkages to BioNet and CANRI (State Initiatives), and Australia’s Virtual Herbarium (National)
1. Enhance and integrate PlantNET infrastructure with new "Collections Management System" (CMS) of RBG Sydney.
2. Hardware and network re-configuration

3. Automate export of data from multi-tabled CMS to web-accessible data tables/files.
3. Automate georeferences and geometry of data for spatial queries using spatial (eg. GIS) and modelling (eg. BIOCLIM) tools.
4. Integrate images into PlantNET using unified model available to BioNet & CANRI
5. Integrate plant information modules of PlantNET.
6. Modify PlantNET user authentication (part of "connect.nsw" proposal).

This project will define and document the Internet environment required within NRIMS agencies to enable data custodians to enter and edit NRDD metadata using MET Online. The project will provide IT staff within NRIMS agencies with specialist network support to resolve individual agency problems. Resulting documentation will be accessible on the MET Online website and in the DIY Manual.

Vertebrate pest infestation data (including rabbits, pigs, wild dogs and goats) from surveys in 1997 and 2002 will be compiled, edited and provided to CANRI for web serving. Data will also be made available on the categorisation of notifiable weeds at a Local Government Area level, generalised maps of major weed infestations for areas of the State, and Local Control Authority boundaries.

NSW Agriculture’s historical physical soil test data, which represent an extremely valuable resource, exist only in hard copy form. A large number of tests are held for the State. High priority data will be selected, entered into a database, geocoded and transferred to the Soil And Land Information System (SALIS). These data will be used in ongoing soil mapping programs, and will be served to CANRI via SPADE. A large number of high quality large (fine) scale soil maps are also held in hardcopy form. These will be digitised, edited and geocoded, and provided to CANRI for web serving.

Fisheries Bionet will provide additional data to Bionet (or an alternate public portal) enhanced datasets as well as working with the Bionet development team to ensure that Fisheries data provided via a public interface to Bionet is appropriately validated.

Provide strategic direction and coordination to the CANRI Program to meet its objectives as stated in its Business Plan and interpreted by the CANRI Program Board. Develop and publicise the CANRI framework. Oversee and coordinate CANRI funded projects. Support the work of the CANRI Program Board and CANRI Community Reference Group. Liaise with key agencies and programs at State, national and international level. Develop and maintain the CANRI website and associated information products.

This project provides funding for a Technical Support Officer to assist all CANRI agencies with:

1. Getting core and priority datasets served via the CANRI Framework, and

Providing technical training to the agencies involved. On-site assistance will be available for all agencies that need it.