Development of a tool to support prioritisation, planning, and community engagement of bathymetry surveys.
The Challenge
Capturing seabed data is a costly exercise making it critical that the areas captured provide the highest community benefit. There are several aspects to this; first multiple parties may be interested in the same location making such areas a higher priority. In addition to this it’s important to recognise different parties may be interested in different data types; this can range from depth data acquired with Multi-Beam EchoSounders (MBES) through to physical samples taken from the seafloor. If a vessel is going to a region to capture MBES data, it should ideally collect seabed data within that region. Similarly, some users be ok with low resolution data, while others require higher fidelity. All these factors must be considered to plan seabed surveys for broadest benefit.
Partners
Geoscience Australia (GA) supported SCT through providing business analysis and testing services while also being the project sponsor. GA were key to engaging the Australian Hydrographic Office (AHO) that led to including support for including Hydroscheme Industry Partnership Program (HIPP) survey requests. Domain expertise relating to what information needed to be captured by SCT was sourced from a previous FrontierSI user needs analysis project and experts within the GA marine team.
The Solution
SCT was developed to provide the Australian seafloor mapping community with a space to collaboratively identify areas of interest, make survey requests, and monitor the progress of planned surveys. SCT is a public facing web-application available for anyone to sign up, and when approved start collaborating.
During requirements gathering three record types were identified: survey plans, Hydroscheme Industry Partnership Program (HIPP) requests, and priority areas. Functionally, these record types share similarities, such as the ability to specify one or more spatial extents (shapefile upload or interactive mapping) and assign metadata. A customisable role-based system was implemented allowing administrative users to create new roles that defined access to different record types.
The front end of SCT was developed using the Quasar Framework utilising VueJS, with Vuex for state management. Leaflet provided map widgets. The backend was developed on the NodeJS platform, with PostgreSQL as the database. TypeORM, an Object-Relational Mapping library, was used to generate database queries and handle schema migrations. Backend geospatial operations were performed using PostGIS (geospatial PostgreSQL extension) or TurfJS. MapServer was included to deliver OGC web services such as WMS and WFS, allowing SCT to publish data for presentation in third-party applications. Docker was used extensively for both development and deployment.
SCT was deployed on AWS. Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) hosted several containers, Cognito served as the authentication provider, and RDS was used as the database. For continuous integration GitHub action workflows were used to build SCT docker containers, push to ECR, and then deploy to EKS.
Impact
SCT has been in operation for two years and over this time has gained several hundred users across the Australian seafloor mapping community. These users have identified over 100 priority areas, and planned over 50 surveys within the tool. Several of these survey plans aim to capturing areas based on user submitted priority areas. The HIPP request record type has allowed AHO to integrate SCT in its survey planning process as it provides a publicly facing platform to publish this information.
Contact
To learn more, contact FrontierSI at contact@frontiersi.com.au.
