By Lilia Guan
Mapping technology that plots socio-cultural information is equipping Australia’s military force to make informed decisions while deployed on operations overseas.
Underpinned with technology from Australian Geographic Information System (GIS) specialists Esri Australia, ‘Human Terrain' maps display the human geography of an area using dozens of different categories such as ethnicity, religion and language.
Esri Australia’s manager for Defence, Simon Hill said the technology supports military decisions in peacekeeping, conflict, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations.
Analysing human geography gave the Department of Defence an understanding of the area it was operating in.
“Human terrain analysis is all about determining the relationship between the characteristics of a human population and that population’s location,” Mr Hill said.
“It provides a geographic context and a timeline to human behaviour on the ground.”
This helps ground forces figure out who controls local resources such as water or transport routes; how ethnic boundaries are shifting; types of crimes most prevalent in the region; the level of education a population - all of which assists with predicting future behaviour.
Mr Hill said the problem in modern defence is there is often too much information available so adding a geographic context helps filter the most relevant from the least relevant.
By visually representing layers of information in a geographic context, users can navigate through the maze of seemingly disparate, unrelated data to clearly identify correlations and relationships that exist.
“Troops in the field can also contribute more quickly and completely to the intelligence picture long before they’re debriefed back at base,” Mr Hill said.
The Australian Department of Defence has been using Esri ArcGIS technology for over 10 years in the warfighter, intelligence and corporate domains.
“In recent years more and more people across Defence have come to understand the value of using ArcGIS to manage complex analytical tasks,” Mr Hill said.
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