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 are working together to create the DWER Hackathon.

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 wants artificial intelligence to be a cornerstone technology in the project, which is where WADSIH comes in.

Just like in past Hackathons, the DWER Hackathon will invite 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 will provide and manage the WAVE dataset, and the AI-based tools that will win the day will accurately identify vegetation types, detect changes, be scalable and easy to integrate with other tools and make decisions about land use much better informed.