Modernising the delivery of Reef data

It’s great when everyone wants your data, but how do you spend less time managing it?

The collective Queensland and Australian Government investment in Great Barrier Reef water quality improvement programs is a sophisticated science driven program involving over 100 organisations. Those organisations span government, regional natural resource management bodies, industry groups, Traditional Owners, conservation groups, universities, the CSIRO, consultants, and regional project delivery organisations.

The design and delivery of on-ground projects is heavily based on modelling and data to support sound investment. These investment strategies often need to integrate with regional delivery priorities, which in turn are mostly science driven. The result is that there are many organisations interested in engaging with the latest available data or modelling results to best inform their contribution to the program.

Sharing data is conceptually simple but it in practice, it can be difficult to deliver in a timely manner. For any given data request, a licence must be put in place, and the point of truth of the data must be maintained such that if data is updated, the data lineage can be tracked. The process of responding to data requests and sharing data from the Paddock to Reef Program, used up weeks of the modelling team’s time each year.

The Paddock to Reef Data Portal makes data delivery easy

The Paddock to Reef Data Portal has been recently released to support the data request and sharing process amongst Reef service providers.

Key features of the Paddock to Reef Data Portal are:

• Versioning and data lineage – any data set is version controlled, to maintain historic lineage and provide access to the latest data.
• Open data – commonly requested data is available for immediate download through a searchable open data collection.
• Download tracking – to download data from the portal users must be logged in. This allows alerts to be sent to those users if the data is subsequently updated.
• Self-service modelling outputs – the custom creation feature allows users to generate specific reports (e.g. dissolved inorganic nitrogen from sugarcane in the Mackay Whitsunday region) by aggregating the detailed results generated by catchment models.
• Data requests – there is a data request system that sends requests to data custodians and tracks responses as well as managing the lineage of delivered data.

It is still early days for the Paddock to Reef Data Portal, and the number of available data sets is limited. We are excited see how this resource grows.