<p dir="ltr">The Richmond River Catchment Mapping Prototype project intends to develop an online mapping tool that will improve education and interaction between stakeholders, and engage community involvement in the Richmond River’s environment.</p>
Publisher
Living Lab Northern RiversPlace of publication
Living Lab, Northern RiversPagination
0-36:36Commissioning body
Department of Climate Change Energy Environment and WaterResearch statement
Mapping Prototype Research
Research background
Although the environmental quality of regional river catchments are typically monitored by government agencies, environmental management is often undertaken by diverse local community alliances, farming associations and NGOs. After a natural disaster like flooding or fire, these disparate groups undertake multiple repair projects in places, but invariably have limited resources or time to connect and coordinate with each other, and little capacity to inform the broader community of their work. To address these management and communication issues, DCCEEW has facilitated the development of a collaborative governance partnership in the aftermath of the Richmond River 2022 floods, and commissioned our research intending to develop tools that will connect and share information about environmental repair projects between local alliances and communities.
Our research focuses on the development of a prototype for alternative mapping that would both empower the governance partnership and inform the community. This field of multi-purpose alternative mapping is being developed in the US: Prof Dilip da Cuhna’s ‘Invention of the River’ questioned traditional mapping techniques that often over-simplify remote sensing from satellite data and GIS technologies techniques; Prof Jane Wolff (University of Toronto) has published visually accessible cartoon-like maps to explain a story of the degraded environments in San Francisco Bay; and Harvard-based academic Prof Gareth Doherty’s 2024 ‘Fieldwork’ defined ways of engaging and communicating with diverse communities as an essential part of environmental design. These and others are exploring the role of participatory mapping, the potential for interactive mapping, and the way we can tell stories through mapping.
The research asks two questions: what kinds of interactive and online mapping bring together community stakeholders to share the task of environmental governance of a catchment that has been significantly affected by flooding and deleterious land use practices.? And how might this be represented to communicate to a broad audience?
Research contribution
There are two key findings.
Firstly, it offers a method for developing ‘data maps’, from traditional digital knowledge gathering and from stakeholder sharing of fine-grained information. The method, entailed events of participatory mapping of environmental projects that are live, or recently completed, in disaster-affected areas, followed by a process of collating and categorising projects at various scales on maps.
Secondly, using the data maps as a starting point, it develops narrative-type mapping, with visual storytelling techniques, that ground and connect people in place to the environmental initiatives that are being carried out by the numerous stakeholders.
Together the two maps provide both accurate and meaningful information for both the community and for the stakeholders.
Research significance
The research into alternative mapping transcends the time-bound boundaries of traditional maps. It extends the research into the communication of resilience-building approaches amongst local communities in a collaborative governance partnership. Since this first project and its participatory mapping, a second stage of the work has now been commissioned by DCCEEW (PRO23-18487 in research master) to engage again with community and develop more detail from the two key findings.
