Frontier Spatial Information

Group on Earth Observations – GEO Week 2022

Statement of FrontierSI

Our purpose is to accelerate the Spatial Industry in Australia New Zealand to deliver economic growth and improved environmental and social well-being and our FrontierSI’s partner-based business model is predicated on the pursuit of not for profit, public good objectives. Through the brokering and delivery of partner-based projects, funds are generated to reinvest in initiatives that deliver economic growth and improved environmental and social wellbeing.

FrontierSI’s mission is to provide the connection point, partnerships, trusted collaborative model and expertise to deliver high impact solutions to complex, multi stakeholder challenges.  Our mantra is to make our partners better at what they do. Our value lies in our ability to harness the spatial expertise of our university and industry partners to solve complex problems.

FrontierSI provides research and innovation services to government, university and industry which includes defining future focused and shared challenges, project brokering and formulation, collaborative applied research and development, spatial and technical advisory, industry engagement, consultancy, and project management and delivery.

We lead, formulate, manage and deliver collaborative projects that have made significant impacts across health, agriculture, natural resources, climate change, defence and the built environment throughout Australia and New Zealand. We have been delivering tangible outcomes and creating measurable benefits for our government, industry and university partners for over 18 years.

Our key technical areas of expertise are Downstream Space Application, Space Mission Design, Positioning, Geodesy, Data Analytics, and Spatial Infrastructures. Our current activities span the key sectors of the Australia and New Zealand economies:  transport (road, rail, maritime, aviation), planning, construction, natural resources, agriculture, defence, utilities, health, government services and resources.

FrontierSI supports the GEO Work Program and looks forward to continuing to contribute to GEO in a myriad of ways including: 

FrontierSI is also assisting Geoscience Australia with the development and implementation of the Open Data Cube implementation in Africa through the Digital Earth Africa initiative.  Digital Earth Africa (DEA) is building the world’s largest free platform that encompasses four decades’ worth of satellite data and, as a result, captures Africa’s changing ecosystem. Free and open Earth observations of Africa offer a critical tool for enhancing planning and resilience measures and shifting course away from impending environmental and climate challenges.  FrontierSI collaborated with the DE Africa team to develop technical training resources, as well as begin the process of improving the capability of human resources in the region.  This has including improving the user experience and depth of technology resources in DE Africa, and supporting the training and capacity building of DE Africa users.

FrontierSI has continued to develop training resources and assisted with delivering workshops.  We have also worked with FAO to upscale existing work from the FAO in land cover and crop mapping using DE Africa’s tools, services and experience to expand the impact into more areas across Africa. The aim of the project is for the new systems to be used by National Statistics Offices across Africa and in the FAO’s existing Hand in Hand Initiative. Building on foundations already established by DE Africa, understanding variables such as the location of cropped areas, crop type, crop extent and crop condition will help users to understand the current state of agriculture and predict the impacts on food security in Africa.

We continue to play an industry consultation and market and development role with the Australian Government on the Digital Earth Australia (DEA) initiative, which supports Australian Government and industry to better monitor, protect and enhance Australia’s natural resources.  DEA is a key piece of public data infrastructure using satellite data to detect physical changes across Australia in unprecedented detail. It offers stable, standardised data from which it can innovate to produce new products and services and be competitive in global markets. It prepares these vast volumes of Earth observation data and makes it available to governments and industry for easy use.

Our Positioning and Geodesy Programs bring together leading researchers, in collaboration with private industry and government agencies, to address the challenge of designing, building and operating a high accuracy, real-time, nation-wide positioning infrastructure.  This infrastructure underpins a wide range of applications which rely on improved positioning, including imagery and data derived from earth observation systems.