The Herbert Resource Information Centre

Community based GIS venture in rural Australia The Herbert Resource Information Centre (HRIC) is a Joint Venture GIS facility providing improved access to a range of information to organisations and individuals to assist better resource planning and management in the Herbert River Catchment.

---

The Herbert Resource Information Centre (HRIC) The HRIC is a rural, collaborative, community-focussed GIS having six signatory partners to a 10 year collaborative agreement, now in its third year and going strong.

The six partners are CSR Sugar Mills, Herbert Cane Protection and Productivity Board, Hinchinbrook Shire Council, Canegrowers Herbert River, CSIRO, and the Queensland Department of Natural Resources.

As a result of the partnership the Ingham community now has access to spatial data, the tools to analyse it, GIS expertise, and a framework of co-operative data exchange and maintenance.

The HRIC will be used by its partners and the wider community to ensure the ecologically sustainable development of the Herbert River Catchment. In doing so, it will provide a 'best practice' model for other rural regions in Australia.

The Website

Once you've hit the website, you'll find it easy to spend loads of time browsing the eyecatching content including numerous papers, descriptions of past projects, data, and loads of pointers and interesting weblinks.

HRIC has developed several 3-dimensional models for the lower sections of the Herbert River Catchment and Hinchinbrook Island. Included with the description of the project are some very nifty MPEG fly throughs of the 3D models... very slick!



Of particular interst is an article describing a Satellite-Based Sugar Cane Crop Yield Estimation Model. The author goes on to describe how imagery is used to estimate crop yields and determine the areas harvested.

For you data hounds, a number of spatial datasets (over 100) can be accessed via the site's data dictionary. Included are detailed descriptions, sample imagery, and metadata. Data themes available inlude climatic, ecology, topo, hydrographic, and satellite imagery. For those of you interested in viewing some eye-catching imagery, examples and details of LANDSAT TM, and SPOT XS image classifications are posted.

Individuals looking for data and pointers to historical data in Northern Australia will find this site to be very valuable. Those of you looking for some fine examples of work integrating GIS and remotely sensed data for agricultural applications in tropical climates will be very pleased with this find!