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New Technology Helping To Protect Barrow Island Environment

Rare and endangered species, such as the rock wallaby on Barrow Island in Western Australia's remote northwest can breathe a little easier thanks to new technology.

Perth-based company NGIS has joined with ChevronTexaco in developing monitoring systems to help protect the environment around sensitive areas.

"What we've done is taken data such as aerial photographs, vegetation maps, animal breeding areas and existing infrastructure to help identify optimum drilling locations and create buffer zones around important habitat", said NGIS Director Paul Farrell.

Barrow Island is located 56 km off the Pilbara coast and is home to many species of plants, mammals, birds and reptiles, including Sea Eagles, Flatback and Hawksbill turtles. Some of these species no longer occur on the mainland as a result of introduced predators and competitors such as cats, rats, and rabbits.

"Our goal in working with ChevronTexaco is to help minimise the impact of exploration, drilling, seismic operations, production pipeline laying and infrastructure on the environment", Farrell said.

The Geographical Information System (GIS), built and managed, by NGIS plays a significant role in assisting ChevronTexaco to protect the conservation values of Barrow Island, while carrying out one of Australia's largest petroleum operations.

For more details about NGIS, check out their website at www.ngis.com.au

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What is GIS?
A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer based system for storing, maintaining, querying and analysing geographic data. Geographic data are those which occupy a position on the earth's surface.

GIS ties tabular data to locations and can also be described as a smart map, linking features to tables of information about them. Typically, GIS deals with two dimensional spatial data.

The type of spatial objects or themes that can be stored come under three categories:

• Point data – represented as a coordinate pair, eg a sign post;
• Linear data – represented by a string of coordinates, eg roads and pipelines; and
• Polygonal data – represented by a closed string of coordinates which encompass an area, eg suburbs or cadastral lots.
• Raster data – Imagery (eg aerial photography, satellite images, etc.)

Unlike a CAD drawing, roads, shire boundaries and rubbish collection routes would all be stored in separate files on disk. In addition to a location, a feature in a theme can have attributes.

Attributes are the measurable characteristics, be they quantitative or qualitative, of features. For example, attributes which may be recorded for a road could include its name, length, condition and traffic count.

NGIS built ChevronTexaco's GIS in an ESRI software environment. The system includes a corporate GIS/SDE solution, GDA 94 and datum conversion, pipeline route optimisation and pipeline leakage risk, emergency response manuals, infrastructure planning and environmental sensitivity analysis.

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