NSW BCT Land Libraries wins 2024 NSW DCCEEW Service Excellence Award!

This year, NatureMapr was fortunate to land the opportunity to design and deliver an innovative biodiversity reporting platform for NSW landholders for the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust.

The innovative project, lead by Alice McGrath, Joel Stibbard and James Lidsey from the NSW BCT Education Team, sought to deliver an innovative educational program for NSW based landholders to report and promote the incredible plant and animal species that exist on their properties.

This project was extremely important for NatureMapr as it represented a fundamental shift in our model, with NatureMapr effectively providing a paid "platform as a service" to a major government customer.

As NSW BCT's supporting platform partner, the inimitable Lewis Choy @choyster and I attended multiple landholder workshops across NSW with the NSW BCT Education Team to help landholders get up and running smoothly.

During these visits, we were blown away by the level of professionalism and dedication to customer service excellence of the BCT Education Team.

Beyond their commitment to ensuring the wide ranging needs, ideas and suggestions of landholders were well supported, what we noticed the most was that this was a team of genuine innovators!

NSW BCT Education Team were pushing hard to break new ground when it came to high quality, expert verified biodiversity data collection within government.

Totally awesome stuff.

"Could NatureMapr do this for landholders?"

"What if we changed X and connected it to Y?"

These were the fantastic kinds of design discussions that filled much of the year in our weekly meetings.

The level of enthusiasm and focus on delivering a positive experience for landholders was astounding.

To support the project, and with a co-investment from the commonwealth, NatureMapr underwent extensive enhancement over a period of many months.

Land Libraries 1.0 was born and was a roaring success with landholders in Pillar Valley, Wauchope, Brogo/Bermagui and Kangaroo Valley.

There were also many key learnings and much invaluable feedback from landholders that will help us continue to improve.

The information reported by landholders, once expert verified, will be fed directly to the NSW BioNet database, before travelling further downstream into the increasingly relevant DCCEEW Biodiversity Data Repository - 2 critical repositories that will maximise the exposure of these trusted records to real decision makers working on real outcomes.

Earlier this week we were not at all surprised to learn that the NSW BCT Education Team have been awarded a 2024 NSW DCCEEW Service Excellence Award.

This award is thoroughly well deserved and it is very satisfying to see our customer recognised for their tremendous efforts.

Congratulations Alice, Joel and James!

Thank you for the opportunity to work together on such a trailblazing initiative.