Organised Editing/Activities/Maleny Maps

Rationale

Maleny communities are vulnerable to bushfires, landslides and flooding. This is compounded with a diminished capacity to take action within the neighbourhood due to an ageing population and absentee land and homeowners. The recent storm seasons seem to indicate an increase in climate related risk. Motivated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic and upcoming bushfire season, Maleny is eager to build local community capacity towards becoming a more safe, resilient and sustainable regional town. The communal use of OpenStreetMap offers the potential for both housebound, absentee and outdoor orientated community members to participate, through remote and field mapping.

By creating a base map via OpenStreetMap, the community will identify hyper-local knowledge around vehicle access to natural and municipal resources and to and from sites of community vulnerability/ importance. This will provide a starting point for the local Maleny community to further map additional points of interest for better preparation and response, potential natural hazards, and places of cultural and historical significance.

Priorities

The Focal Issue for this mapping initiative is to generate community disaster resilience data towards predicting increased climate risk within Maleny's communities. The three capacity building priorities for future proofing and sustaining this participation are to:

1. Empower local communities to design and implement place-based mapping data;
2. Strengthen connections between individuals of local communities;
3. Show how to implement the project as an ongoing continuous community capacity building initiative

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This project was initiated as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UN SDSN) Youth Local Pathways Fellowship (LPF) program. The fellowship aims to empower young people to champion and create local pathways for sustainable development by implementing a process of “localising” SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities in the places they represent through the development of a project. The project brief can be found here

The aim of the project is to provide better contextual insight of the local communities’ capacity in preparing and responding to potential hazards, stresses and shocks across the selected area of Maleny to help address United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Target 11.5 Reduce the Adverse Effects of Natural Disasters.

Contact

Project Initiator: Ritva Vilppola (ritva.vilppola@localpathways.org.au)

Project Mentor: Rupert Allan

OSGeo Oceania Host Representative: Phil Wyatt

Community consultation

A range of key stakeholders were consulted over the past several months to gain an understanding of how the project development from the UN SDSN LPF program could align and provide beneficial information of the Maleny area. The engagement was held through surveys and meetings with the local residents, selected community groups and organisations as well as broader professional and humanitarian practitioners.

The suggested project options were presented generally to the broader community via their alignment with key deliverable types and areas of interest with the understanding that the proposal ideas may not be easily understood without specific knowledge in the different fields. All project options are best approached through participatory processes and ideally led by community therefore, the areas of most interest is imperative. The majority of respondents were willing to support all the different project solution options. Approximately 17 community residents answered the survey with most interest in interactive Community Activities and/or workshops closely aligned with the interests of learning new skills and physical activity.

Due to existing document heavy resources and upon further conversations with humanitarian practitioners, a Community Risk Reduction Mapping project was the most attractive and beneficial task to involve the local community with a more interactive and skills building focus.

Hashtag

#MalenyMaps #MalenyMapathonWeek2023

Timeframe

It is anticipated that HOT Tasks will be live in July 2023 for the community to commence an initial series of mapping activities as a trail with the intention to continue mapping additional layers of information as an ongoing process.

Tools and data sources

OSM/HOT: iD Editor

Participants

The following participants include:

• Local Community Mapping Volunteers
• HOT Mapping Volunteers

Measuring our success

The Maleny Maps Project's three key Actions with six Indictors are as follows:

1. Increased open-source data access of:
   1. Base maps: % increase of building footprints, roads, waterways mapped
   2. Additional points of interest maps: % increase of data points mapped
2. Increased community awareness of:
   1. Hazards and disaster management: Self-rating of confidence
   2. Local resources and information: Self-rating of knowledge
3. Increased community capacity of:
   1. Basic mapping and data literacy skills: % increase on self-rating of knowledge
   2. Social connectedness: Self-rating of making new and/or enhancing existing connections

Training/instructions

Maleny Maps Project Specific Mapping Notes

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY! Please map carefully and take your time. It is better to do it accurately the first time than going quickly and having to edit it later.

Imagery:

• Please use Bing
• Many of these squares will already be partially or fully mapped, map in more if needed or fix up the existing mapping, or just mark it "Done" if it is already complete.
• Please connect up roads that are not connected to the main network or nearby roads.
• Existing mapping may not match imagery - This happens in some areas. Use the Bing Imagery, but adjust it so it aligns with the existing mapping, then continue mapping. Please leave a comment in the Tasking Manager when you mark done/stop mapping to say you adjusted the imagery.

Buildings:

General

• Please accurately outline all the buildings you can find. The outline should be for the full size of the building even if it is partly covered by trees in the imagery. By zooming in you will be able to get the size and shape right.
• Most buildings are rectangular.
• Some buildings may be very close, but do not actually touch each other. Zoom in and try to map them close to each other without letting them connect or share nodes with each other.
• Avoid connecting with roads or residential area outlines.
• If a building is sitting on the task square boundary line, map the whole building outline.

Tags

If you are using iD Web Editor, you will most often use the following "Building Features":

• Buildings come under "Areas"
• Generic Building: In the iD web editor, select "Area". The first time you map a building you will use the "Building Features" category as an "Area". In the left side panel, you will see "Area" or "Building Features". Click on this. At the top of the list select "Building" again, to delineate "Building"= "yes". This is the most generic building tag we can use. We cannot tell the more specific use of any building from imagery alone.
• Residential Building: If you are mapping your neighbourhood, you may know which building is a residential building- please tag accordingly and only if you are absolutely certain.
• Retail Building: These are likely to be in the town centre. If you know which buildings are used as retail stores specifically, please tag accordingly and only if you are absolutely certain.
• Commercial Building: These are buildings which are used for commercial purposes like offices. There may be buildings which are a combination of retail and office. If this is the case, please tag as Commercial rather than retail. Only tag where absolutely certain.
• Other useful building designations in the drop down you may feel confident to use instead of "yes" are: "Apartment" or "Industrial"

Roads:

General

• Please map roads and major paths as completely as possible by connecting them to the main road networks wherever possible (no roads go nowhere!)
• Please connect up roads that are not connected to the main network or nearby roads.
• Very short segments that do not connect to anything should not be mapped
• Short segments of a road or path that you cannot see through the trees but seem very likely to exist should be mapped to keep the road complete
• Try to map a little beyond your task square so the person who maps the task square next to yours can easily connect them (but not too far!)
• Always connect roads to other roads where they meet. Don't make the mistake of ending a road on a Residential Area polygon edge (i.e. borders), for instance

Tags

You will most often use the following "Road Features"  (iD Web Editor):

• Residential Road - These are roads that are in towns/cities but only are used for access to houses and buildings.
• Driveway - These usually connect from a higher class road to the home on the property. These are usually short. If the "driveway' to a property is many kms long then it's more likely a Land Access Track
• Land Access Track - This is for roads that only lead to farm fields or forests. They do not connect settlements or residential areas.

Firewater:

Farm Dams (Reservoir preset)

• Using the area tool, digitise around the current water level of the dam and then apply the reservoir preset.
• If the reservoir is empty, then make a guess as to the normal water level, tag as a reservoir, then add the intermittent = yes tag.
• This will add the following tags: natural=water, water=reservoir, intermittent=yes (optional)

Swimming Pools

• Using the area tool, draw around the waterline of the pool and apply the Swimming Pool preset.
• If the pool is square, then remember to square the corners with the “Q” letter on your keyboard (or right click on shape and 'Square' the object).
• Add the “Allowed Access” tag of private unless its clearly a public pool!
• Tags: leisure=swimming_pool, access=private (optional)

Water Tanks (typically circular and 2 - 5 metres diameter)

• These may be hard to identify given the base imagery. The easiest way to draw a water tank is to use the area tool to create a triangle on the perimeter of the tank, then apply the water tank preset, then press the letter “O” on your keyboard.
• You can also right click on the object and use the “circularize” tool.
• If you need to move the object press the M key on your keyboard.
• You can also copy and paste if there are multiple tanks the same size (CTRL C, CTRL V).
• You can also increase or decrease the size of the tank with the Shift+ and Shift- keys.
• This will add the following tags to the object: building=yes, content=water, man_made=storage+tank

**Caution** – in rural areas there may well be Silos that also look like water tanks. They are generally away from buildings, often in clusters, have a cone shaped top, throw longer shadows and often have large openings that can be easily seen. Do not tag these.

Post-event clean-up

OSGeo Oceania will be responsible for validation.

Results

In addition to these initial mapping activities, a toolkit to encourage other local communities to assist in disaster resilience mapping of their local areas will be developed in the future.