Location Matters

The 2019-20 Black Summer fires burned more than 18 million hectares. In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai talks with Jake Ramsay, Planet's defence and intelligence account lead for Australia and New Zealand, about what changes when agencies can see the entire continent from space every day.

Jake walks through the full fire cycle: tracking fuel load before the season, measuring whether planned burns actually worked, tasking high-resolution imagery over an active fire ground within hours, and mapping fire scars and catchment damage afterwards. He also explains how nine years of daily imagery is changing long-term risk planning.

Key Topics Covered:

• [0:18] Black Summer, and seeing the whole of Australia from space every day
• [1:17] Jake's path from open source intelligence to Earth observation at Planet
• [2:26] What it takes to image Earth's entire landmass daily, and why daily matters
• [4:00] How a constellation of passive satellites line-scans the planet and downlinks to ground stations
• [7:04] How commercial startups made satellite imagery affordable and accessible
• [8:14] Why Australia's scale, terrain and varied fire behaviour suit satellite monitoring
• [9:37] Fire spotting before satellites, from hilltop lookouts to aerial patrols
• [10:51] Tracking fuel load and drying vegetation in the months before a season
• [13:36] Measuring whether a planned burn worked across the whole treated area
• [16:10] Tasking high-resolution imagery over an active fire ground to guide evacuations and resourcing
• [17:21] Planet's two constellations, daily passive coverage and tasked imagery delivered within hours
• [18:46] Where satellites fit alongside aerial and ground crews during a fast-moving fire
• [20:09] Mapping fire scars, habitat loss, infrastructure damage and catchment impacts after a fire
• [21:54] Jake's experience of the 2003 Canberra fires and Black Summer, and why floods often follow
• [23:31] Nine years of daily imagery and what it shows about long-term fire risk
• [25:47] AI, automated detection and what agencies will be able to do in five years
• [28:15] Using AI to triage where scarce ground resources go first
• [29:09] Why the first conversation should be about the operational decision you want to improve
• [30:11] How the NGIS and Planet partnership builds imagery into existing government workflows
• [31:20] Jake's closing message on El Niño, drought and preparing for this summer

Resources Mentioned:

• Planet, Earth observation company and NGIS partner, operating the daily imaging and high-resolution tasking constellations discussed in the episode
• NGIS, Australian geospatial company that builds satellite imagery into the systems and workflows government agencies already use
• How satellite-based Earth observation supports emergency response teams, NGIS article on satellite imagery for emergency management
• Planet's rapid SkySat data enables effective regional bushfire management in Australia, Planet case study on tasked high-resolution imagery for bushfire management
• From Bushfire to Flood webinar, Planet webinar on Earth observation across bushfire and flood

About the Guest: Jake Ramsay is Planet's defence and intelligence account lead for Australia and New Zealand. He has a background in open-source intelligence, including geospatial and Earth observation, and works with emergency management agencies and government partners across the region to close the gap between what they think is happening on the ground and what they can see. Based in Canberra, Jake experienced both the 2003 Canberra bushfires and the 2019-20 Black Summer season first-hand.

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In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai is joined by Oliver Looker, Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS, to talk about what it actually takes to measure road congestion across an entire city. The average person living in a major Australian city loses around 80 hours a year to traffic, and building more roads is rarely the affordable answer.

Oliver explains how TraceMark Flow turns Google's Road Management Insights data into something transport agencies can work with, refreshed every two minutes and covering a whole city or a whole country without putting a single new camera or sensor in the ground. He also covers how the approach compares with SCATS and inductive loop sensors, where AI fits into predicting the effect of storms and big events, a case study from Thessaloniki that measured a 40% travel time impact from a major road project, and why the congestion an agency knows about is often not the congestion costing it the most.

Key Topics Covered:

• [0:14] Meet Oliver Looker, and the plan to become a pharmacist that turned into a career in geospatial
• [1:42] MapInfo, Arc/Info and ArcView: what GIS looked like in the 1990s
• [2:58] Conservation and Land Management, the UK, and a knock at the door from NGIS co-founder Richard Bentley
• [4:24] Winning a Google Maps Platform award for TraceMark Flow
• [4:59] What TraceMark Flow is: tools built around Google's Road Management Insights data
• [5:54] A ten year journey, starting with Transport for NSW in 2015
• [6:21] The cost of congestion, from 80 hours a year in Australian cities to $293 billion across the US and Europe
• [7:51] Why coverage and scale matter more than any single sensor
• [9:13] Predictability: the metric transport agencies actually care about, from airport runs to freight corridors
• [10:05] How TraceMark Flow compares with SCATS, inductive loops and CCTV, and why it complements rather than replaces them
• [11:47] Where AI comes in: predicting the effect of weather events, storms and big crowds
• [13:23] Network resilience, and modelling flood and cyclone risk to road infrastructure out to 2040
• [14:26] Situational awareness today, digital twins next
• [15:31] Asking the platform a plain-language question and getting the insight back
• [16:26] Case study in Thessaloniki: measuring a 40% travel time impact from a major flyover project
• [19:12] Anonymised, aggregated, and refreshed every two minutes
• [20:04] Why building out a physical sensor network is cost prohibitive, and what happens when half of it stops working
• [22:07] What implementation involves, and why it is a matter of weeks
• [23:49] Finding congestion nobody knew about, from traffic light phasing to potholes in New Zealand
• [25:58] Prioritising roads, incident types and reporting by role
• [27:15] Where to find TraceMark Flow

Resources Mentioned:

• TraceMark Flow, NGIS's transport management platform
• TraceMark, the wider NGIS product suite
• NGIS
• Google Road Management Insights, the traffic dataset within Google Maps Platform that TraceMark Flow is built on
• Creating Smarter Cities eBook
• SCATS, the adaptive traffic signal control system developed by Transport for NSW
• Google Maps and Waze, the source of the user-generated disruption reports discussed in the episode
• ITS Australia

About the Guest: Oliver Looker is Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS and an active member of ITS Australia. With more than 25 years in spatial science, he believes location intelligence is the key to the future of transport and sustainability. Oliver studied at Curtin University, began his career with Western Australia's Department of Conservation and Land Management and an agricultural consultancy in the UK, and joined NGIS in 2004. He now leads the team behind TraceMark Flow, which won a Google Maps Platform award in 2025 for its work turning Google's road data into decision-ready intelligence for transport agencies, logistics operators and emergency services.

Know someone working in transport, local government, logistics or geospatial technology? Share this episode with them.

Episode Description:

In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai sits down with Aditi Kale, who works on sustainability strategy for Google's consumer electronics division and its Nature & Biodiversity pillar. Aditi walks us through a case study from the industrial Red River Delta area of northern Vietnam, developed alongside NGIS's TraceMark™ platform, which shows that factories and industrial sites can be genuine, thriving habitats for local wildlife.

A note on the regulations: At around 6:30–7:30 we refer to the EU regulations discussed as having been pushed back. To clarify: those delays apply to the CSRD and CSDDD. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has not been pushed out and remains on its current timeline.

From the EU's evolving deforestation and sustainability regulations, to the species ecologists have found living at “purely industrial” sites, to simple, low-cost “no regrets” actions any company can take today, this conversation makes the case that protecting biodiversity and running a resilient, cost-effective supply chain can go hand in hand.

Key Topics Covered:

• [0:56] Meet Aditi Kale and the Red River Delta case study
• [1:05] Aditi's path to sustainability, from national security to Google's Nature & Biodiversity team
• [2:17] How the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) sparked Google's partnership with NGIS on TraceMark™
• [5:04] EUDR, CSRD, and the growing “alphabet soup” of EU sustainability regulation
• [7:22] Why getting started is easier than most businesses expect (Correction: the delays discussed here apply to CSRD/CSDDD. EUDR has not been pushed back.)
• [10:30] Reframing biodiversity as supply chain risk management
• [12:12] How TraceMark’s geospatial data pairs with on-the-ground species monitoring
• [13:52] Nature at work: the impact of green landscaping on factory worker wellbeing
• [16:31] Second-order wins: pollinators, local farmers, and surrounding communities
• [17:01] The proof: over a decade of native landscaping data from Google's own campuses
• [19:54] How industrial sites become accidental habitats, from marine jetties to factory floors
• [21:10] Getting started with TraceMark™, its new API, and licensing options for suppliers
• [22:11] “No regrets” actions: simple, low-cost wins any company can implement today
• [23:10] A new, free ecological-planning tool, and why it works for backyards too
• [25:55] Inside the biodiversity monitoring manual: affordable, privacy-first acoustic and eDNA sensors
• [28:25] Aditi's closing message: move past the doom and gloom, and take small action

Resources Mentioned:

• TraceMark™, NGIS's geospatial sustainable sourcing platform, built on Google Cloud
• NGIS
• Google's Biodiversity White Paper: the Red River Delta, Vietnam case study referenced throughout the episode
• Google's Biodiversity Monitoring Manual: an overview of affordable, privacy-centred monitoring devices (including passive acoustic and eDNA sampling)
• Second Nature Ecology and Design, ecology partner on the case study
• EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)
• Google Earth Engine

About the Guest: Aditi Kale leads sustainability strategy for Google's consumer electronics division, covering environmental and social responsibility for products and platforms including Pixel, Nest, Android OS, Chrome OS, Google Play, and Google Photos. She leads Google's Nature & Biodiversity pillar within its supply chain, working with partners like NGIS and Second Nature Ecology and Design to bring the same native-landscaping approach used at Google's own campuses to manufacturing sites around the world. Aditi has been at Google for over 15 years across a range of teams, and previously worked in the national security sector.

Know someone working in sustainability, supply chain, or geospatial technology? Share this episode with them.

HERE Technologies has just been recognised as the top ranked location platform by industry analysts at Strategy Analytics. The annual report benchmarks the world’s largest location companies and ranks HERE, Google, Mapbox and TomTom across seven categories. We were lucky to speak with two experts in the location technology industry recently, and our discussion dives into why HERE Technologies outperforms other companies when it comes to data and maps for the emergency services industry. 

This episode of Location Matters features guest Jeeten Chauhan, General Manager from Next Mile Location Technology and Nick Preston, ex-HERE Technologies Product Portfolio Manager. With podcast host Claire Wilson, they discuss the unique challenges that emergency services face in data ingestion, storage and updates. HERE Data is imperative for emergency services organisations to have the most up to date data feeding into their CAD system and due to their commitment to quality data and regular updates—HERE Data is the best available on the market to fulfil this requirement. 

With up to date data, customisability features and real-time traffic visualisation, the HERE Geocoding, Routing and Map Data products are the best available on the market for emergency services organisations. Listen in to this episode to find out why. 

Read more: 

Data with benefits: Optimise your emergency management CAD system

Location Matters welcomes CEO of FrontierSI, Graeme Kernich to the podcast for the first time to get the scoop on the updated Coastal Risk Australia, climate modelling tool which was first built in 2015. In partnership with FrontierSI, NGIS developed Coastal Risk Australia to illustrate the severity of rising seas based on the latest scientific modelling, via an interactive map accessible to the public. On today's episode we'll be chatting with some of the people responsible for this game changing app - NGIS Executive Director, Nathan Eaton, and the CEO of FrontierSI, Graeme Kernich. 

Learn how this team used the 2021 IPCC data to update Coastal Risk Australia to show the public how rising sea levels may encroach on their community and wash away iconic Australian beaches by 2100. 

Coastal Risk Australia

IPCC report

COP26

We are excited to have Karen Joyce, She Maps Founder and Senior Lecturer in Remote Sensing, back on the Location Matters podcast this week! Karen sat down with our Senior GIS Consultant, Marty Rocks, and Winyama IT Coordinator, Time Cable, to talk about everything drone mapping. 

Tune in to this episode to learn about some of the coolest places Karen, Marty and Tim have flown drones, and how they have used drones for surveying land in the Kimberely with Indigenous Ranger groups, to gathering data about sea cucumbers on the Great Barrier Reef. Karen also shares some great drone mapping tips for those just getting started! 

She Maps

Winyama

An Introductory Guide to Drone Mapping

Getting started with drone mapping

Find out what ‘rubber-ducking’ is. Hear why Khia has been crying happy tears and celebrate the perspective that women bring to the table in this special edition of Location Matters, curated in lieu of International Women's Day. 

New Location Matters host, Claire Wilson, is joined by guests Kate Kirwin, founder of She Codes, Daphne Yu, Graduate Developer at NGIS and Khia Emslie O'Brien, Winyama Digital intern. The discussion centres around why programs like She Codes are helping to upskill women with the technical skills required to land careers in the tech industry.  According to the ABS in 2020 only 13% of women made up the total employees in the STEM workforce. We would like to change that statistic and raising awareness is one way to do so.  

This episode was planned to air before this year’s International Women's Day, but unfortunately was held up. Though, we are advocates for women every single day of the year and this episode is just as relevant today as it was on that day. We hope it inspires you and empowers you to reach new heights in your tech career. 

**Please forgive the unusually quiet sound in this episode**

She Codes 

International Women's Day 

Coders for causes

Female coders collective Perth 

JuniorDev

In this week’s episode we are excited to welcome two colleagues from our new Brisbane office onto the Location Matters podcast to talk about the Esri ArcGIS utilities upgrade. Alex Geer, NGIS Queensland General Manager, and Conway Pene, Principal GIS Consultant have worked on many utilities GIS projects and give us some insight into what this Esri upgrade will mean for utility companies, what the process looks like and some of the roadblocks they might face.

NGIS contact us page

We’re back with a brand new season of Location Matters! To kick off the first episode, we’re joined by Andrew Dowding, Managing Director of Winyama, and Yvonne Fong, Data Scientist at EO Data Science, to discuss the importance of First Nations Earth Observation and how Winyama are working towards seeing more Indigenous communities utilise Earth Observation (EO). Andrew and Yvonne also touch on some of the interesting ways EO is being used across the world - sometimes without people even knowing!

Winyama 

Indigenous Mapping Workshop Australia

EO Data Science  

Google Earth Engine tips 

Blog: What is First Nations Earth Observation

Web portals

Sea Level Rise - Coastal Risk 

NAFI - North Australia and Rangelands Fire Information 

MyFireWatch

Digital Earth Australia Hotspots 

Atlas of Living Australia

This is the final episode of season three of Location Matters! Thank you to all of our listeners who tuned in this season to hear about the latest trends and technologies in the GIS industry. In this week's episode our podcast host and Marketing Manager, Sarah Butler co-hosts with our Marketing Coordinator Claire Wilson and Principal GIS Consultant Nicholas Chai, to discuss a game changing solution built at NGIS by our very own Senior GIS Developer, Rick Huang. 

To avoid the regular headaches of upgrading ArcGIS Enterprise, Rick developed a solution; the NGIS Upgrade Solution which minimises production downtime during an ArcGIS Enterprise update to only 40 minutes, where it would otherwise take upwards of 400 minutes. We discuss how this benefits companies in not only reducing downtime but also reducing mistakes! Tune in to learn more about this solution. 

Blog: An NGIS upgrade solution

Contact NGIS