Restoring traditional country with aerial AI
Nov 2024
Nov 2024
Combining traditional knowledge on Country with aerial imagery and AI insights, the Nari Nari Tribal Council is creating positive change for future generations.
At SXSW Sydney in October 2024, Jamie Woods (Gayini Land Manager, Nari Nari Tribal Council) presented alongside The Nature Conservancy (Vera Rullens, Geospatial Information Officer, and Mike Roache, Protected Landscapes Director) and Nearmap (M’Shenda Turner, Senior Director, Survey and Geospatial Content Operations) to share how geospatial insights from high-resolution aerial imagery and AI-data is informing ecologically enduring, sustainable land-management decisions.
For more than 50,000 years, the land of Gayini in the NSW Murray-Darling Basin wrote its own story, and the Traditional Custodians listened, coexisting sustainably. But when the land was taken and developed for grazing and crops, channels and other structures were built to control flood waters, impacting vegetation, wildlife, and Indigenous communities.
Located on the Murrumbidgee flood plain, one of the flattest landscapes on earth, the 88,000-hectare Gayini property is the size of 16 Sydney Harbours. With many inaccessible areas, understanding what is happening at ground level and observing change over time is crucial for effective ecological restoration and land management.
The first image below shows the Nearmap capture footprint across Gayini, spanning 88,000 hectares. The second image below shows a map of Sydney overlaid with the capture outline of Gayini, for perspective on the property’s size.
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“Bringing 88,000 hectares of data into one image is so powerful”
Mike Roache, Protected Landscapes Director, The Nature Conservancy.)
Gayini — back in the care of traditional owners
As part of the Murray Darling basin plan, in 2018 the New South Wales Government bought the land that is now Gayini. The Nature Conservancy Australia, Nari Nari Tribal Council, the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of New South Wales and the Murray Darling Wetlands Working Group formed a consortium to care for the land.
In 2019 when the Nari Nari Tribal Council regained ownership of Gayini, the landscape had been degraded by decades of manmade intervention, with irrigation channels and levees blocking or diverting the natural water flow. Water quality had deteriorated and wetlands were deprived of seasonal water, impacting flora and fauna.
Today, once again under the care of the Nari Nari people, traditional knowledge combined with technology-driven insights is helping restore and protect the land and its wildlife.
“The Nature Conservancy is interested in protecting nature and fresh water in Australia as the lifeblood of well-being, and we want to work with First Nations groups to help them back onto their country and manage it in perpetuity. Gayini is the perfect example of all those factors combining, and we do that with a scientific mindset,” said Mike Roache, Protected Landscapes Director.
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The geospatial technology toolkit: AI-powered insights
As part of the land management practices under the Nari Nari Tribal Council, Nearmap provides high-resolution imagery of the entire Gayini property captured in two surveys each year around April and October delivering high-resolution imagery with a Ground Sample Distance* (GSD) resolution of 5.5cm—7.5cm, showing how the landscape changes from year to year.
*Image clarity is measured by ‘ground sample distance’ (GSD) — the lower the number, the better the clarity. Satellite imagery generally offers around 30cm GSD.
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The image above shows Nearmap AI identifying different features in the landscape: medium and high vegetation in yellow; low vegetation in magenta; very low vegetation in green, and water bodies in blue.
Gayini is home to populations of migratory and native birds and animals, and threatened species.
When the water arrives, the land comes to life providing feeding grounds and rookeries for various birdlife – including Black Swans, Painted Snipe, Spotted Pardalote, Emus, Bitterns, Superb Parrots, the critically endangered Plains-wanderer, and Pelicans.
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In 2019, Jamie Woods and the Gayini land managers came across a family of five endangered Plains-wanderers — an exciting discovery. Today, spotters can identify 100–200 Plains-wanderers in one night — testament to the traditional management and regeneration practices being applied. The image below shows an area of the property where a levee was opened to let natural water flow through.
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Vera Rullens, Geospatial Information Officer at The Nature Conservancy, gains valuable information from Nearmap imagery across the entire property, including AI layers that automatically identify water bodies (lakes, rivers, swamps, wetlands and irrigation channels), and vegetation levels.
“The more of these time points we’re capturing, the bigger the story gets, and the more we can understand how the property is changing and how management actions contribute to the changes,” said Vera.
“Across the 88,000 hectare property, The Nature Conservancy works with 150-billion pixels of imagery with Nearmap AI — a huge dataset for us to work with — we can turn this data into maps that tell a story by looking at patterns.”
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From a land management perspective, to regenerate land from heavily modified agricultural use back to natural wetlands requires a natural flooding regime to be reinstated.
The image above shows a series of surveys indicating where Nearmap AI detected water and vegetation. You can see that October 2022 was a wet year with heavy rainfall and a lot of flooding on the property, as indicated by greater areas of dark blue.
“We’ve put choppers in the air during floods, we’ve spent a lot of our own money flying over going and dropping GPS points — but we won’t have to do that now, because Nearmap imagery tells us where the constraints are in the landscape”
Jamie Woods, Gayini Land Manager, Nari Nari Tribal Council.)
Healing Country for future generations
When the Nari Nari Tribal Council regained ownership of Gayini in 2019, the main goal was to bring the land back to its near-natural state.
Nearmap imagery and AI data is playing a role in helping Jamie Woods and his team achieve targets by providing property-wide data that helps verify the results from traditional management techniques.
“We want the veins of this Country to carry the lifeblood, and the only way we can do that naturally is to take out these structures and constraints [irrigation channels and levees], which are brick walls and barriers for water,” said Jamie Woods.
We always said that as this Country healed, it healed the people that were involved in it – that’s the big impact story.”
Step lightly towards smarter regeneration
Remote assessment across large areas can help reach decisions quicker, backed by accurate data. Keen to know more?