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Ten years of Change

Web Report

PhotoSurvey is an application that aims to make environmental monitoring fast and affordable.

Today hundreds or thousands of photos are taken for a single project. When these photos are organised according to context, subject, location and date taken, they become a valuable environmental monitoring resource.

If a project site is revisited and more photographs taken, these photographs can be matched with previous photographs of the same site. Environmental changes then become apparent, particularly changes caused by unpredictable events such as floods, cyclones, droughts and climate change. Traditional baseline surveys are usually poor at monitoring the effects of these events, as they are usually designed for monitoring expected changes.

PhotoSurvey has revolutionised environmental surveys at Forest & Sea consulting. In the field we photograph everything that could be important and take hundreds of GPS points a day. Several pages of notes and measurements are also taken. At the end of the day we download the photos and GPS points into a computer for backup. Now we use PhotoSurvey to connect the photos, GPS points, notes and measurements to each other. Usually one hour is sufficient for organising and archiving a days work within PhotoSurvey.

After the field work has been entered, a web report showing which areas were surveyed and what subjects were covered can be displayed. This is very useful for planning the next days work or showing a preliminary result to the client.

PhotoSurvey can export to a GIS so field data can be mapped and analysed. It can also export pre- formatted environmental reports to a word processor to speed up the creation of a final report. PhotoSurvey includes special tools for converting information in photos to semi-quantitative data (e.g. grass cover = dense) and for creating time series of photos for ecological change analysis. The data formats used by PhotoSurvey are industry standard and should be readable decades from now.

PhotoSurvey can be an alternative to traditional measurement based monitoring in many cases. If traditional monitoring is used, then PhotoSurvey can be extended to record the traditional measurement data as well or can be used as a complimentary system.

Here is an example drawn from a revegetation project recorded with PhotoSurvey.

This example shows how site information can be displayed with Google Earth