Salinity conference

Brief review of the draft review report
Dr Peter Woodgate

Peter Woodgate has recently been appointed CEO of the newly created CRC for Spatial Information. He was previously CEO of RMIT's Geospatial Science Initiative (1999-2003).  During this period, Peter was responsible for a number of initiatives that included helping to establish RMIT University's first spin-off company, Spatial Vision Innovations Pty Ltd; the creation of the Risk and Community Safety Research Centre in partnership with Emergency Management Australia and the Australian National University; the establishment of RMIT's Global Sustainability Institute, and working as a foundation member of UNESCO's new Mornington Peninsula and Westernport Biosphere Reserve, a partnership between the Commonwealth, state and local governments and many local community groups and businesses. Peter has over 20 years' professional and academic experience in a range of disciplines spanning the pure and life sciences, engineering, business, public policy and administration.

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We have got a very clear purpose for our review: to undertake a review of the mapping methods into detecting dryland salinity. It is not a review of mapping that has been done in the past, it is not a review of the outcomes of that mapping, it is actually a review of the systems.

Our target audience is very broad – there is a broad church of users out there – and what we have tried to do is to identify the appropriate questions that this target audience would like to have answered. I have listed there in the target audience the general range of potential users. It is the farmer, it is the land manager, it is the regional manager, it is the government, it is the private sector, it is a broad range. So you can see that in terms of setting up the purpose and then relating that to the target audience we have got a fairly wide range of aspects that we need to cover.

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The outputs of the review are straightforward. There are two dimensions to it: firstly, a User Friendly Guide, and, secondly, a Technical Report. We have drafted the User Friendly Guide and Technical Report for public review, and they have been out there for about a week now. We have allowed feedback on that, and we hope to get a lot of feedback today. We then intend to go forward, take your feedback, revise those reports; they will then go off to the clients, and the clients will then decide where to go to from here.

The two dimensions to the outputs are very clear. The User Friendly Guide is meant to point up, in plain English language, how a non-technical person can get access to the mapping techniques that we are talking about. If they wish to then drill down to the detail, and are so inclined, they can go across to the Technical Report, where we have got more of that detail present. So it may be that some users require both documents; in other cases it may be they require only one.

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The process that we have run is one of issuing calls for public submissions to the review, and then receiving submissions – and we have received 30 comprehensive submissions. It is now over two and half thousand pages of written material, plus CDs, maps and images, and it has been very welcome. It has made a fantastic difference to the quality of the information that Brian and I have been able to review. We have also noted, however, that there are some aspects of mapping systems that are not covered by those submissions, and so we have needed to do additional independent research analysis ourselves.

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For each mapping method that we have looked at, we have covered these aspects. Clearly, we have summarised it. We have attempted to identify its prior use, and if there have been evaluations, to refer to those evaluations. The scale and level of survey and the design have also been covered, as have the data requirements, the interpretation and the mapping products. The mapping products are essentially the information, the information products, from which the end user can then go and make decisions as a result of that information. So we have taken it through to that level of detail. We have tried to clearly identify, in plain English, the limitations of those mapping systems – that is, the buyer beware statements – along with the assessment of the fitness for purpose. So there are some early pointers when you glance through the User Friendly Guide as to the efficacy of each mapping system. We have also separated the role of the mapping system in dealing with hazard as opposed to dealing with risk. I will cover that more in detail in a moment. Where mapping systems operate better in tandem with other systems, we have started to look at that aspect. We could probably do a little bit more work on that one, though. We have also tried to identify the costs, so even at a fairly cursory desktop level a potential user could do a back of the envelope calculation on the cost of applying that technique to an area.

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So what have we done that's new? There is an enormous amount of mapping information out there at the moment. Well, first and foremost we have attempted to dissect these two issues of hazard and risk, and to clearly define them in user-friendly language. Secondly, we have provided some steps towards the development of risk management – that is, how the information product feeding in from the mapping product is fed in to the risk management process and can be used for end-output decision making.

We have covered 19 classes of mapping products. That is, not individual satellite systems as a separate mapping method; we have grouped satellite systems. We have grouped some of our on-ground systems. So we have got 19 classes. If you want to go down to the detail, you would probably expand that to maybe 60 or 70 different approaches.

We have identified the depth below the surface at which each method operates, and we have also put in place an investment analysis, the kind of logical thinking that an end user would need to go through to determine the usefulness of any one given mapping system or combination of systems. So if you are an end user and you want to determine whether you have got a salinity problem and whether that mapping cost is going to provide you with an accelerated benefit for collecting information that the mapping method is going to give you, you have got a step-by-step process you can follow to go through that thinking.

We have also provided an updated list of information sets required for full risk assessment. Many of the items on that list are beyond the scope of this study.

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There are certain things in our reports, though, that are incomplete. Each system in its own right could have many, many pages devoted to it. Brian describes it as a book – each one could have a book. We are not going to go to that level of detail, but it may be that there are some where we have not provided enough detail, and we would love some feedback on that.

We do intend to include case studies, and we have noted in the Technical Report up to nine case studies which we feel would be very useful to illustrate the point. We don't yet have the detail around those case studies; we hope to have that very shortly.

There are some aspects of the mapping methods that we have covered which we feel still need peer review, and we are referring aspects of our written reports to critical people to get that peer review. I can illustrate that with one area that I am still concerned about: airborne radar mapping of salinity. We have made some comments in the report on that particular one. I am not yet convinced that those comments stand up. We need to look for some further independent advice on that. And clearly the issues that are identified through this forum today will be of fundamental importance to us.

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Hazard and risk, just to fix these in your mind: we have defined hazard, consistent with the Land and Water Audit, as anything that can potentially cause harm to an asset. So salinity is clearly a hazard. It doesn't mean it is actually causing harm at the moment, but it could potentially.

We have distinguished that from risk. Risk is the probability that that hazard will at some time in the future cause real damage to an asset. So risk is a forecasting technique. It determines the impact and the likelihood, and therefore the consequences of that impact and likelihood. Risk is a much more complicated issue. Mapping methods collect information that feed in to risk assessment, and they develop the potential for cost-benefit analyses.

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There are three scales of users – the farm scale, the community scale and the catchment management group – and we have attempted to get into the minds of users at those three scales. We have posed a series of simple questions at each scale that we think those users would want answers to. There is some overlap between the scales, but there is also independence between the scales. And we have identified, to the best of our ability, where each method operates at each of those scales.

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I will not go through these in detail, but in totality this list of factors affecting groundwater movement – this is the first page and there is another page of them – we think embrace, operating on the 80/20 rule, all those factors that we would need information about to come to solid conclusions about the risk potential in any given area. Where a mapping method provides an attribute that can be used against one of these factors affecting groundwater movement, we have identified that attribute.

So if you are an end user and you just want to map salt, you have got that information. But if that same mapping technique also, in parallel, collects attributes that can be applied to risk, we have noted that as well. For some users, that might just be a benefit; for others, it is a cost saving.

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This is the rest of the factors affecting groundwater movement.

I will leave it there and invite my colleague, Brian, to take you through the structure of the report.