2024 SAG Award Winners

Ethos Environmental

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Project Goal

The New Zealand Marine Vessel Portal is a new solution allowing Regional Councils and agencies to track marine pest transmission on boat hulls, which makes use of ArcGIS technology including ArcGIS Hub Premium, combined with various other ArcGIS Apps. These pests (eg Mediterranean Fan Worm) attach themselves to the undersides of boats and ships and can be transported from round the world to the waters of New Zealand, where they present a very real threat to the unique native aquatic wildlife here. In addition to the collection of data by biosecurity officers, vessel owners can “claim their vessel” via the Hub and participate in the collection of data and participate in protecting our marine environment.
The project was undertaken by Ethos Environmental as the latest in their ongoing series of innovative ArcGIS-based Conservation solutions and projects.
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Business Problem Solved

Our industry is quite unique in that we are “in the business” of stopping native species from going extinct. As is usually the case in New Zealand, this mainly involves stopping an invasive species from decimating a local, fragile ecosystem. The main problem from a data management perspective in this project was that we needed to track the movement of boats in order to control the spread of the invasive species that stow away on their hulls and then deposit themselves at a new harbour. Unfortunately in NZ we do not have a national register of marine vessels, so we had to create a system to assign and manage unique functional identifiers for an unknown number of boats before we could even begin thinking about tracking their movements. We achieved this and the system is now being used to analyse and report on over 13,000 boats as they move around the entire coast of New Zealand.

Technology Implemented

The system is built on Hub Premium allowing boat owners to register, enter details, biosecurity actions and location of their own boat They can also recall this and any information that any of the many biosecurity officers across 10 Regional Councils have collected on their boat at any time using their secure AGOL login. The biosecurity officers in the field primarily use Field Maps, with a very complex Survey123 form launched from popup for the hull inspections. This form has dynamically updated hosted CSVs with comprehensive details, history, and even images (Base 64 encoded) of every boat in the system so they can reference these instantly in the field, even offline.
Managers can track the movement of boats, infestations, field workers (and much more) through many pages of Experience Builders and Dashboards within the Hub.
The system also ingests data from AIS boat tracking API to display the real time location of boats and join this to the data we have collected on these vesse

Development Team Biography

Scott Sambell - Project lead/ ArcGIS Online developer
Scott is a field worker who has worked across NZ and its islands for decades and became frustrated with the lack of technology used in conservation. With no formal GIS training, he often imagines systems that others have deemed beyond the limit of what GIS software is capable of - and then stubbornly builds them.

Enric Shen - Head Developer/ Portal Administrator
Enric is the systems administrator and has a vast practical knowledge of GIS. He has a unique talent for inventing new processes that turn a need into new solution and integrating it.

Chad Benham - FME developer
Chad’s speciality is in FME software and he is responsible for the many processes and automations that whir along night and day on Ethos Environmental’s FME Server

Maryanne Read - Data manager
Maryanne has qualifications in both GIS and Conservation and is an experienced field worker. She is now responsible for day-to-day data management of many of the