What is NARCliM?
The NSW and Australian Regional Climate Modelling (NARCliM) project helps us understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change. It supports decision-making across sectors in New South Wales, helping to build resilience for the future.

Why is this important?
NARCliM climate projections provide critical information for planning and decision making to manage risks like bushfires, floods, droughts, and heatwaves. This helps ensure that communities and infrastructure are prepared to face these challenges.

Real-World Applications

As extreme weather events become more common, NARCliM projections provide strategies to reduce their impact on infrastructure, businesses, health, industries, and communities. For example, when temperatures exceed 40°C, railways need to be monitored and train speeds reduced to prevent derailments. NARCliM data helps us plan for and adapt to such rising temperatures. This is just one example of how trusted data from the NSW Government helps prepare for changing conditions.

NARCliM 2.0 Data on SEED
SEED’s interactive map allows users to combine NARCliM data with other datasets, like bushfire-prone land or species sightings, providing deeper insights into climate impacts. This helps users make informed, data-driven decisions to help protect infrastructure, ecosystems, and communities from climate risks.

To Learn More About NARCliM:

• Watch a video series to dive deeper.
• Visit the AdaptNSW website.
• Explore the NARCliM data on SEED.

Twenty-eight years worth of existing data from the citizen science water monitoring program Streamwatch is publicly available on the Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data portal, making its mark as the first community-generated dataset on the platform.

The SEED data team worked with the Australian Museum to bring nearly 11,000 data points to life and present them visually on the SEED map. In June, Streamwatch volunteers got a first look at how their hand-on science and environmental monitoring information was translated and viewed on the SEED map, with many bringing questions on how to layer different charts to see trends over time and view different areas.

Those accessing Streamwatch data through the SEED map viewer can see and compare collected water monitoring information such as PH levels, turbidity and electrical conductivity in Streamwatch monitoring areas over time.

Streamwatch and its hundreds of dedicated volunteers deliver scientifically accurate data on water quality and health of local waterways across the greater Sydney, Blue Mountains and Illawarra regions.  

From July 2019, management of Streamwatch and the activities of its volunteers have transferred to the Greater Sydney Landcare Network.

View the Streamwatch data here.

What happens when you gather some of the most creative minds across the country and give them free reign to generate innovative tools using open government data? You get GovHack – an open data competition with the exciting potential to produce effective solutions to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges.

The Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data (SEED) portal joined forces with GovHack again this year to showcase some of New South Wales’ environmental data and to learn a thing or two about what opportunities open government data present to better society. After sifting through an abundance of entries for our SEED GovHack Challenges, we found some little gold nuggets within some of this years’ winning projects: GreenRoutes by Mentally Friendly and CoolWalk Sydney by Team 520.

We spoke to Thom Vincent – a member of the Mentally Friendly team who won our Three C’s of Innovation Challenge – to gain some insights from the weekend and see the inspiration behind their project ‘GreenRoutes’.

Thom is the Technical Director at the design and innovation studio Mentally Friendly. With the studio having over 15 years’ experience helping decision-makers build evidence to confidently launch products and services that make people’s lives better, Thom saw another opportunity in GovHack to challenge himself and collaborate with like-minded individuals to build a product that would benefit the community.

GovHack is founded on principles of collaboration – where from the action of putting many ideas and minds together, innovation can flourish. Thom and another colleague Alex formed the basis for participating in GovHack after looking for hackathon opportunities across Sydney. Their other colleagues Liam, Amanda and Tyson joined soon after. Together they formed a super team comprised of a product manager and three developers. Amanda organised the planning of the build and strategy, Liam worked on the design, and Alex and Tyson built the prototype. In the spirit of teamwork, they floated between roles and supported each other.

To selecting from the multitude of datasets, solving unexpected technological problems, and forming various prototypes, the team crossed the finish line, submitting their entry with half an hour to spare.

Spawn out of their curiosity and ideation was the application: ‘GreenRoutes’.

GreenRoutes

With temperatures rising in Sydney each year, GreenRoutes aims to prepare citizens for heatwaves, tackle the issue of congestion and improve the well-being of the community through providing an application that calculates the coolest route to travel across Greater Sydney. By combining tree canopy data and urban heat data from SEED with a navigation algorithm to plot walking routes, alongside cycleway and local wildlife data, the application visually illustrates an efficient route for citizens to reduce their exposure to heat but still get them to where they need to be. Watch their elevator pitch on the application here:

Top tips for GovHack participants

For those considering participating in GovHack in the future, Thom provided a few key tips.

1. Spend some time upfront as a team planning for the weekend. Use this time to define the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it. This means creating a strategy and finding a way to execute that strategy.
2. Talk to those around you. It’s always beneficial to bounce ideas off other teams. Don’t worry about other teams copying your ideas. And take advantage of the mentor sessions – go in ready to present your idea and with questions to ask.

3. Last of all, don’t forget to have fun! Take advantage of meeting.

   

    

   Key learnings

   If there’s one key lesson to gain from GovHack, it’s the boundless opportunities that open data presents. As Thom says, “The most important benefit of open government data is its ability to foster social innovation. Open data provides organisations and the government with new opportunities to collaborate – allowing them to work together on improving existing services or creating new ones … Organisations can use the data to design a service or build a product that could help a community – or the entire population of Australia.”

   And with that, another year of GovHack is over. It’s amazing what can happen in the span of one weekend. Thom sums it up perfectly in saying We only had a weekend. But in that time, we were able to prototype a product using real data. Imagine what we could do with a few months.

   We only had a weekend. But in that time, we were able to prototype a product using real data. Imagine what we could do with a few months.

   

   Mentally Friendly taking home the prize for the 'Three C's of Innovation' challenge. 

   Read more about the  Mentally Friendly Team and their GovHack entry ‘GreenRoutes’ here.

This update incorporates user feedback as part of the ongoing effort to continuously improve the NSW plant community type classification of the state vegetation type map. While the update involves no changes to the PCT Master List (version C2.0 remains current), the state vegetation type map has been revised (version C2.0M2.1). See 2024 release notes.

Feedback/Support  

You can provide feedback on the map through the Provide Feedback button in SEED.

For general support, please don't hesitate to contact the BioNet team at [email protected].