Effective conversation, land management and environmental monitoring in remote areas is impossible without high quality data. So far, information categorising and identifying vegetation types in Western Australia has been a highly manual and fragmented task full of inconsistent workflows and results that are impossible to correlate or integrate.

That’s why WADSIH, the WA Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) and Humyn.ai worked together to create the DWER Hackathon in June 2025.

Working with satellite imagery of WA’s Pilbara region, WADSIH is a primary collaborator on the Department’s WAVE (WA Vegetation Extent) mapping system, a Pilot Project to classify vegetation in line with the State Government’s Native vegetation policy.

For the first time on this scale, DWER wanted artificial intelligence to be a cornerstone technology in the project, which is where WADSIH came in.

Just like in past Hackathons, the DWER Hackathon invited coders, programmers or just people with great ideas to come together in a week-long event of mentoring, brainstorming and building to solve the big problems of remote land management.

Project partner Humyn.ai provided and managed the WAVE dataset, and the AI-based tools that won the day were concepts that accurately identified vegetation types, detected changes, were scalable and easy to integrate with other tools and make decisions about land use much better informed.

Click here to learn more about the WA DWER Hackathon 2025