Scoping win-wins for People and ‘Urban Nature’ in our Suburbs

Tract and Deakin University’s Live+Smart Lab are funding Georgina de Beaujeu’s PhD, which is considering how to create co-benefits for urban nature and people in our suburbs.

The first step was to develop a site analysis process to determine if, and where, co-benefits and trade-offs might present in a place, and then applying this process to a local government area.

Georgina wanted to analyse the area from the perspective of people, then urban nature, then bring those views together to understand where needs did and didn’t align. This meant determining available datasets that shed light on human and ecological health and wellbeing in a place, as well as how to analyse them – but Georgina is not a GIS expert. OneMap bridged this gap.

OneMap enabled Georgina to look at a range of factors that matter for people in a place, from SEIFA disadvantage to population density and forecasts. For urban nature, OneMap presented canopy tree heights and ground cover, as well as building footprints and heights.

To meaningfully consider connectivity for wildlife it’s important to start at a regional scale and zoom in. Also, what needs to be measured changes at different scales, for example SEIFA scores at a suburb level and continuous canopy cover at street level.  OneMap enabled Georgina to easily move between regional, city and local scales to consider different factors that impact on the health and well being of urban nature and people in a place.

The heat map function, available on a range of datasets, from proximity to open space, transport, major shopping centres to schools, enabled Georgina to test how far people were from the amenities they need, as well as where a network of existing open space existed that could be retrofitted with additional habitat features. Some datasets, such as building heights, can be filtered. Georgina used this tool to identify building heights over 10 metres, which can be a barrier to movement for select wildlife.

OneMap tools, such as measures, filters, and buffers, helped Georgina explore strategies, for example buffering creek lines to see whether the current conservation zoning meets good practice riparian benchmarks and understand how far different taxa groups, such as woodland birds or water-based insects, could travel into the suburb given their dispersal ranges if barriers, such as roads and buildings, were moderated.

By saving a project view and exporting successive maps Georgina was able to overlay data in Adobe Photoshop to identify potential ‘win-win’ locations for people and urban nature. OneMap also enables property boundaries and up to two extra data sets to be brought together in one place, such as overlaying Population Density and Bushfire Zones to identify which Areas have the most people at risk of bushfires.

We are proud to be supporting this important research.
Read More about this work from Georgina below:
https://tract.com.au/co-benefits-for-urban-nature-and-people-but-how/