burnMap Summary
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Innovation — Supporting Complex Decisions — Accessing Unofficial Expertise — Community Sensemaking
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Impact & Practicality
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Transdisciplinarity
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Gaps & Weaknesses
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Future Research Plan
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Summary The aim of this design research study is to prototype a digital tool that will enable more effective planning of controlled burns in national parks. burnMap is a dynamic spatial decision-support tool that will assist park managers in the selection of appropriate times and locations for controlled burning. Conditions that affect burning, including preceding weather data (such as temperature), as well as current wind and rainfall events will be fed back to burnMap via wireless telecommunications and through a web interface developed as part of this project. burnMap is a device that visualises and communicates complex information in an accessible manner. It caters to a complex decision-making process that both affects and enables efficient land management. The map is the intermediary – the outcome of the aggregation of complex and diverse data that is currently inaccessible (i.e. from reports, or from people who have no way to have a voice), or in diverse domains. burnMap visualises the relations between systems of information that may be social, technological, geographic, environmental, political and ecological. This project refigures the integration of traditional geovisualisation practices within these systems in order to aid improved protection of the environment.
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burnMap addresses a need, articulated by Parks Victoria, for the development of ‘spatio-temporal dynamic modeling capability’. CThis otters requirement creates a significant design problem, because Lake T rk Cothe tters information South Trk to be modeled comes from multiple domains and k r T needs ot to be intuitively communicated to people from a wide range Tin P Trk of backgrounds. Vere ker The components of data, knowledge and platforms already exist. This research will help define how these components rk ill T are activated and what forms these activations might take. dH Re
The following scenarios explore possible forms of this activation, and dig into some of the questions that are raised by using burnMap in different contexts.
Tidal River
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Image Overall Fuel Hazard - showing the combined influences of naturally occurring fuel on the danger of fire in different parts of the Prom. (also appearing p 14, 15.)
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Greg McCarthy DSE Landscape Burn Co-ordinator Land and Fire, Fire Planning, East Gippsland Area
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Supporting Complex Decisions Jim, the Head Ranger at Wilsons Promontory, has responsibility for deciding how to manage controlled environmental burns across the entire national park. With years of experience, he thinks he has a pretty good idea of where and when, how fast, how hot and how far to burn. Climate change and other factors have begun to make a real difference in the way fire behaves at the Prom, and Jim wants something more solid than his experience to help him make decisions. There are topographic maps showing slope and orientation, vegetation maps showing dominant species and weather reports. In the filing cabinet, Jim has all the data collected by the volunteer ecology group indicating fuel load, regrowth rate, and the site’s burn history. All of these documents contain information that is significant to any burn, and if they could be brought together Jim would have a very powerful tool to help him decide where and when to burn. This system could synthesise his expert knowledge, the variety of formal and informal data that has been collected about this environment and the geographic, ecological and cartographic resources scattered around his desk. burnMap is the tool that makes this mosaic of information visible. The burnMap system helps to predict the extent of a fire under given conditions. Jim is able to visually model a variety of scenarios to help him make decisions about controlled burns and to help foresee the behaviour of bushfires. Jim can use burnMap out in the field, adding more information to it, making new observations, corrections and annotations. He shares burnMap with other rangers so that they can also make better decisions, and learn what he already knows. Jim uses Burnmap to gather infor
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mation out in the field
Contour maps
Fuel load
Species maps
Growth rates
Weather
Burn history
Jim, the land manager uses Burnmap to make decisions for controlled burns
Questions How can we help Jim to make better decisions without getting in his way? What happens when burnMap and Jim disagree? How can uncertainty be communicated and then resolved? How can burnMap help junior members of the team access Jim’s wealth of experience? What kind of information does Jim need to understand the situation well enough to make a decision? How should this information be presented, to make it most easily understood?
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Accessing Unofficial Expertise Brian and Rika bushwalk regularly throughout the national park and, being keen photographers, have a large collection of photos from various remote corners they have visited – areas the rangers rarely get to. These two know their stuff. They can identify a wide variety of different plant and animal species and the rangers know that their photo archive, collected over many years, is an invaluable source of information. Through the public facet of burnMap, Brian and Rika are able to contribute their photos and indicate where and when they were taken. They tag them with various terms, and other park explorers do the same. Jim and his staff curate their own collection of photos, adding them to burnMap so that they can use them to help identify landmarks and locations in the field, or even to understand changes in a particular location through a visual timeline. The rangers’ favourite is the collection of views of Mt. Oberon from Tidal River. They have 50 years of photographs from more-orless the same place, which they’ve curated into a movie. As it plays you can see changes in the landscape that would otherwise go unnoticed. Others can view this album, using it as they see fit. Brian and Rika, for example, use these photos to find a particularly spectacular colony of flying duck orchids, while Jim and his team view the photos in the field on his portable burnMap as they prepare for a controlled burn.
A hiking group member spots a rare orchid...
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And takes a photo on her GPS-enabled digital camera...
At home, she logs into the public burnMap website...
And uploads her orchid, automatically adding it to the public map.
Petalochilus carneus
Questions How can the barriers to participation be lowered for unofficial experts like Brian and Rika? How can they easily share their content with burnMap? How can they retain control over content they have created? How can burnMap easily collate and suggest relevant unofficial content? How can this content be managed so that it compliments rather than overwhelms the official content? How might people use burnMap as a way to tell stories about an area?
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Community Sensemaking The Memorial Hall is bustling with noise as everyone gets ready to hear about the proposed controlled burns in the region. Jim and his staff from Parks Victoria make their presentation, which particularly emphasises which burns are going to happen on the various boundaries of the national park — those places that directly join the properties of those present. These meetings are often difficult: there remains much distrust and fear of any sort of fire or burning; a belief that things were better when cattle grazed on what is now the national park; and a feeling among the property owners that, as landowners, they have the right to do as they please on their land. For Jim and the team, these meetings enable information sharing and consultation as well as education of the local community. They are an essential part of the state’s fire management plan – important to the management of the park ecology and the minimisation of the dangers posed by uncontrolled fires. burnMap is used to provide a large-scale overview of the management plan and burn strategy for the next three years. Rangers are able to zoom in on specific parts of the park and its boundaries. This visual aid helps illustrate problems and answer questions. The team is able to include photos from before and after burns along a variety of timelines, to show the types of fires being proposed and the recovery phases of burnt regions. The mood softens and the locals provide additional information about aspects of the boundaries that are unknown to Jim and his team. They easily add this information as notes and annotations on a new burnMap layer. Later, back at the park, Jim’s team review the annotations and notes made on this new layer.
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The park manager is able to zoom in on specific areas of interest.
Presenting the burn plan to the local community...
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Extra layers of information, like photos can be shown on the map...
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To help the park manager show how life will flourish after the burns.
First orchids After the burns
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Questions How might burnMap be used to facilitate learning and negotiation between people around land management? How can Jim develop presentations with burnMap that help him to explain the use of fire in land management? How can burnMap model the implications of certain decisions, while also showing the current situation? What kinds of issues are most important to the local community, and how can burnMap aid the discussion of these issues? How can unofficial knowledge be collected quickly? How can this unofficial knowledge be represented alongside official knowledge, to make better decisions?
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Impact & Practicality This project revolves around the production of a particular type of map that is able to present and model, in real time, the likely intensity and range of controlled fires to be conducted under a burn management plan. This map will be digital, bringing together a variety of information from a diverse range of sources, and will allow for the presentation and display of this information electronically.
UN-OFFICIAL EXPERTS
EXPERT DATA COLLECTION
share media
WEATHER AND MAP DATA
add data
decision-making LOCAL COMMUNITIES showing & learning
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LAND MANAGER
The Map is not the Territory The burnMap project is interested in two things: • a map that visualises this system of data and information; and • the network of relationships between official and unofficial expertise, and data that feeds into this map. The burnMap project goes deeper than just mapmaking by seeking to understand how to meaningfully visualise the social, technological, ecological, geographical and cartographic information that will support decision-making in relation to land management and fire. Each of these domains are complex systems in their own rights and, combined in burnMap, create an even higher level of design complexity that we aim to resolve. The burnMap prototype will be relevant to land management as it relates to controlled burns on public land. It will make the task of deciding on the time and location of controlled burns considerably easier in its supportive function for relevant land managers. A significant amount of the data needed for this project already exists, though it is in diverse forms and contexts. The consolidation of this data and research, and the development of forms of knowledge visualisation and interaction to support decision making around burns, are viable outcomes that will contribute to the larger aims of the project. While burnMap requires a digital ‘back end’, it will be presented in a variety of formats across different platforms. This is important to its successful adoption and deployment.
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Transdisciplinarity The project team is made up of rangers from Parks Victoria, and land managers from the Department of Sustainability and the Environment, involved in the development and implementation of controlled burns. From within RMIT there are staff with expertise in cartography and geovisualisation, interaction design, information visualisation, internet studies, new media and experience design. The team has worked together for several years on a variety of projects, including a current ARC linkage project and a collaborative annual research symposium. A hallmark of the team’s practice to date has been an interrogation of the ways in which design and new media studies can be be used to theorise cartography, and how the concerns and methods of cartography might be applied to design and new media. In other words, the project group is premised on the two-way flow of methods and problems into our respective disciplines. In this particular project, the team is now applying previous explorations to the specific issue of land and fire management through this collaboration with Parks Victoria.
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Image by Avlxyz (http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/) Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Gaps & Weaknesses The project team is aware of relevant work done in Europe that provides real-time monitoring and visualisation of natural disasters such as floods, as well as systems that model avalanche danger in Switzerland. However, the specifics of these projects, and the research and models that underpin them, are unknown. In addition, the key members of the burnMap project team are not currently familiar with the fire models that burnMap will rely upon, their veracity or complexity. The bid team also recognises the need to have on board someone who is conversant with the mathematical modeling of elements like wildlife and their movements in parks. The team has approached Professor John Hearne, School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences, RMIT University, who specialises in the use of quantitative techniques to solve natural resource management problems. The research we’ve done up until now has been inspired by the specific issues of controlled burning of public land, specifically at Wilson’s Promontory. During this expansive phase of ‘working out what the problem is’, we’ve identified that a system like this would also be of use in many other situations – for example, in engaging with wider communities and pro-am or ‘unofficial’ expertise. Our scenarios reflect this wider understanding, but we don’t yet know enough about these complex situations. Moving into the next phase of this project, we would question the assumptions we’ve made in the scenarios by closely examining the potential use of systems like burnMap in wider community contexts. There are weaknesses in many of the assumptions we have made in terms of the possible real-world uses of the burnMap. To overcome these, burnMap requires extensive prototyping, user testing, and field evaluation.
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Future Research Plan
This project is built on initial innovations in the visualisation and modeling of fuel-hazard accumulation undertaken by the project partners Greg McCarthy and Jim Whelan. This initial work resulted in a draft report that integrated maps and text-based data analysis. Although this report represents a significant shift in making this complex data accessible, it is still limited to paper-based outputs that draw only on official data sources Millar Rd INLET for use within the organisation.
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The limitations of this design were the catalyst for the development of He lliburnMap. The project will draw on cutting edge ‘social data visualisation sons T r k techniques’ that combine data visualisation with web 2.0 technologies.
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The next phase (the next 6–9 months) of the project will involve the development of an initial prototype of burnMap. This will include:
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Mincollating potential data sets (scientific, expert and Identifying and eT r informal). These willkinclude images, Bureau of Meteorology reports, geomorphological data, topographic data, vegetation maps, fuel load data and cartographic information. Exploring methods for data representation and visualisation. This will include mapping and visualisation devices for communicating different kinds of data, the relations between data sets, temporal and spatial information. Modelling scenarios of use for burnMap to identify and evaluate its potential as an aid in decision making for mosaic burn management.
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Engaging end-user representatives in the design of the prototype and proposed interface (including land managers and external community representatives). burnMap has two key facets: one looks outwards to the community as a communication platform, while the other looks inwards as a decision-support tool for DSE and Parks Victoria land managers.
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Critiquing other modeling and communication tools that have similar attributes with the intention of identifying best-practice models. Although our initial research shows that there is no other such system available, there are aspects of burnMap that should build on the best-practice attributes of other land management and community involvement tools. A survey of other systems will be undertaken and key features will be included in the design specification for the prototype, as will information from the consultation process with burnMap stakeholders.
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The burnMap team
Professor William Cartwright Elseyto gather information out in t Jim usesMonique Burnmap Dr. Michael Dunbar Chris Marmo Greg McCarthy Adrian Miles Dr. Brian Morris Dr. Laurene Vaughan Jim Whelan Jeremy Yuille
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