We’re delighted to share that Dr. Aiden Price (QUT Senior Research Associate and AURIN Environmental Health Domain Expert), Annie Wu (AURIN Associate Data Engineer), Flavia Barar (AURIN Data Scientist), Jiaying Kou (AURIN Product Owner) and Emma Joughin (AURIN Head of Marketing) have won their thematic category in the UN World Data Forum’s 2024 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition.
The competition invited teams from around the world to submit a story created using ArcGIS StoryMaps, with each submission required to align with one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The AURIN and QUT team, who submitted under the umbrella of the Australian Data Science Network, created a story responding to the fourth thematic area of the competition, “Effective partnerships for better data and a more equitable data ecosystem”, winning for best story in this category.
Their winning story, “Understanding Heat Risk in New South Wales, Australia”, explores how open data maps heat vulnerability across NSW, helping to guide communities toward a resilient future.
“This whole process was a great chance for our team to bring together our domain knowledge and learn a new way to present spatial data to the public. We’re very proud to be representing our organisations and to have used this opportunity to communicate such an important topic,” says Aiden Price.
The story drew on concepts from the Heat Health Vulnerability Indicator (HVVI) case study, a part of the wider Australian Urban Health Indicators (AusUrb-HI) project enabled by collaboration between AURIN and partner National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities – the Population Health Research Network (PHRN) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
“This was an exciting opportunity to share spatial data in a compelling story format, allowing us to test the possibilities of a narrative approach to presenting data-driven research. It’s great to see how effective this story-focused form can be, which we look forward to incorporating as part of future projects,” says Flavia Barar.
The project drew on a wide range of datasets and sources, with those used to develop the story including:
- Gridded climate data from The Long Paddock’s Scientific Information for Land Owners (SILO) database, developed by the Department of Energy and Climate (DEC) in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM);
- Global canopy height estimations from ETH Zurich;
- Australian Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS);
- The Index of Relative Socio-economical Disadvantage, also from the ABS;
- Health survey data from the Public Health Information Development Unit (PHIDU) Social Health Atlas; and
- General Practice (GP) services and Emergency Department (ED) locations from Healthdirect Australia’s National Health Services Directory (NHSD).
“While we’re very grateful to have won in our category, it’s also encouraging to see such a wide range of subjects in the StoryMaps created for this competition. We believe data is critical in understanding and addressing problems like those in the SDGs, and these projects all highlight the role data can play in creating a healthy and sustainable future,” says Annie Wu.
Congratulations to the team, as well as to winners across the other categories!
You can explore the winning story on heat risk here, and further details of the competition and winners can be found on the UNWDF’s page.
See here for a full media release.
Read more from QUT (‘ASDN Team Wins Global Award at UN World Data Forum’).
Read more from Australian Data Science (‘ASDN Team Wins Global Award at UN World Data Forum’).