DPIRD
Digitising a world leading shark monitoring system to promote ‘Sea Sense’
Challenge
It was 2014 when we were first called into a planning session by the Department of Premier and Cabinet, their marketing agency and what is now the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD). The agenda for the session was to strategise solutions for promoting shark awareness and beach safety to West Australians as part of a broader government campaign. This session gave rise to the concept of a new digital service called ‘SharkSmart’, a real-time GIS based shark monitoring service. The SharkSmart service would end up integrating services from DPIRD, WA Water Police, Surf Life Saving and Twitter to map tagged shark detections, public sightings and patrolled reports.
In 2018, DPIRD was receiving a growing number of requests to release a mobile app to make accessing shark activity on the go simpler. To achieve this they re-engaged Hatchd and app specialists, Adapptor to conduct planning workshops to design an app that would meet the requirements of not only the general public, but also people heavily invested in using WA's coast including surfers, swimmers and divers.
Approach and Inputs
To do the job effectively, Hatchd, Adapptor and DPIRD worked with a range of organisations to provide access to a variety of data. Like the website, the app would need to integrate with DPIRD's world-class shark monitoring network that provides real-time alerts for tagged sharks and receives updates from beach and aerial surveillance. The simple map interface allows users to discover and add their favourite coastal spots, then view a raft of helpful information attributed to those locations such as SLSWA patrolled beach times, weather forecasts and nearby shark activity.
5000+
Coastal Features
41
SLSWA patrolled beaches
801
‘BEN’ signs to help users report exact locations.
World leading
Shark monitoring network
Beach-goers can personalise their experience by saving favourite spots in order to trigger real-time notifications of shark activity and highlight important updates that are nearby. Additionally, the app provides the most accurate location information to be reported to Water Police in the case of a shark or whale carcass sighting.
Built using React Native, the two mobile apps speak to an app server to access DPIRD’s content management system. This was built using a MongoDB Atlas cluster and an AWS instance to ensure availability of the information. At any time the service can also be scaled up to cope with greater demand. The service also utilises Firebase for messaging and analytics, and Willy Weather for live weather data.
Outcomes
4.7 star
App from 500+ ratings
>1,000,000
Page impressions of SharkSmart site.
>30,000
App users.
Incite Awards 2020 Finalist
For ‘Innovating Government’
