Support for all aspects of the Hydrographic Surveying profession
including, but not limited to:
Promotion of hydrographic education, training and continuing
professional development.
Review and update of standards and guidelines.
Blue Surveying and Hydrospatial data management.
Climate change and its adaptation.
Mission Statement
To promote the aims and objectives of FIG to hydrographers
through the active involvement of national delegates from member
associations and other interested parties in the activities of
the Commission.
To assist international bodies such as the United Nations
and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) in the
protection of the marine environment and promotion of safe
navigation.
To develop guidelines and standards that will assist
hydrographers in the provision of their services considering the
current trends and requirements.
To disseminate the information and the latest innovations on
the profession through participation in international meetings,
conferences and committees.
General
Commission 4 strategies are aligned with the vision and
objectives of the FIG. Further, FIGs agenda is underpinned by the
need for a sustainable profession that delivers in a sustainable
manner and addresses the global sustainable agenda to address the
climate action. Further to that, it also include:
Support for the Hydrography profession internationally
including development of best practice guides, certification
pathways and advocacy.
Support the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO)
and associated United Nations programmes.
International Board on Standards of Competence for
Hydrographic Surveyors and Nautical Cartographers (IBSC).
Cooperation with other FIG Commissions, Task Force and
Networks.
Cooperation with sister organisations and other appropriate
bodies.
Working Groups
Working Group 4.1 - Hydrographic Standards and
Guidelines
Policy Issues
Systematic data processing for safe retention of redundant
soundings.
Additional data layers in standard final survey data
transfer formats (BAG/HDF).
Signing and validation of datasets for nautical charting.
Addition of data density layer to (Bathymetry Attributed
Grid) BAG datasets, in conjunction with the Open Navigation
Surface Working Group (ONSWG). We will be generating a
specification change proposal for the ONSWG following the BAG
format v2.0 merge. Geoscience Australia/AusSeabed have offered
to assist with developer support to help create new format
specification and library modifications for the next BAG format
merge.
Drafting of new publication on data processing with
statistically redundant data - aims to address potential risks
and provide workflow guidance for deterministic approaches and
machine learning approaches to processing, verifying and
presenting bathymetric surfaces from highly redundant sounding
datasets. Aiming to build this with some assistance from CCOM
(and hoping UNH/CCOM will see some benefit in becoming and
Education/Institutional member of FIG).
Recruitment and re-engagement drive - although I have had
fleeting interest from people in assisting the working group, I
currently only have two volunteers in addition to myself to
assist and everyone is rather time poor! Additionally, I would
like to try to encourage some institutional memberships for
global bodies who generate defacto standards for hydrography
(UNH/CCOM being one example).
Workshop(s)
Locate23 (SSSI and SS+NZ annual conference).
AMSA (joint annual conference - Australian and New Zealand
Marine Sciences Associations).
9th Shallow Survey conference (delayed due to Covid) may be
held later this year or early 2024.
FIG WWs.
Publication(s)
Aim to publish new guideline on processing with redundant data by
end 2023.
Timetable
BAG format change submission will commence on the next
version release of BAG - for hopefully inclusion in the
following release. About 1 year to 18 months from now.
Redundant data publication - Q4 this year.
Several other activities are wide spread throughout the
upcoming 4 years term.
Beneficiaries
Hydrographic offices that seek to use a cryptographically
signed surface as their final survey deliverable - but are using
unsigned proprietary formats at the moment so that sounding
density data can be included.
Users of MBES systems and LiDAR systems with rapid large
area capture (AUV, UAV, USV, SAS etc.) who need to utilise data
redundancy to process data on an area basis, but wish to retain
an unmodified record of the underlying sounding data.
Working Group 4.2 – Blue Growth & UN Sustainable Development Goal 14
Policy issues
The United Nations Development Programme Sustainable
Development Goal 14 (SDG 14) advances the sustainable use and
conservation of the oceans and requires effective strategies and
management to combat adverse effects on the oceans through
overfishing, growing ocean acidification and worsening coastal
eutrophication. This top level statement gives encouragement to
Ocean policy makers to develop sustainable projects and paths to
develop innovative and effective solutions related to Climate
Change, Food Security, Safe Maritime transport and use of the
oceans as well as a fundamental appreciation of the importance
of our seas and Oceans.
The Sustainable Ocean and Hydrogrpahy work plan is based
upon the ongoing work of Commission 4. It is a diverse and wide
ranging topic but the primary focus for Working Group 4.2 is the
development and promotion of capacity, skills guidelines to
manage our oceans and seas in a sustainable manner based upon
accurate data, sound environmental principles and good
management practices.
The Surveyor, and in particular, the Hydrographic Surveyor,
has a key role in developing an understanding of our seas and
oceans for the wider social benefits and Commission 4 aims to
promote this role, the benefits and offer case studies of
participation and support.
Chair - Mr. Gordon Johnston
(UK)
Co-chair- TBC
Specific project(s)
The Working Group 4.2 shall seek to promote and engage with
international government and non-governmental organisations to
increase the understanding and awareness of the importance of the
marine and ocean areas. In particular, the use of new technologies
that will impact on the efficiencies and the future workforce
requirements is important. There are several formal project planning
tools and a further area to develop will the use of a formal
standardised tool to identify the benefits and outcomes of
Hydrographic related projects across the broader socio-economic and
regional communities. Not just the entity that may have applied to
undertake some works.
Workshop(s)
High on the agenda will be to engage with UN-FAO and World Bank
to determine how these organisations perceive the importance and
benefits of developing the capacity and skills to collect and manage
the marine and ocean data sets that will underpin our decisions
relating to the Circular Blue Economy areas. An area that is
developing is around the automation and use of remote controlled
unmanned systems to collect data efficiently and with a lower carbon
footprint. This trend will have huge implications on our
Professional Sector and will be the subject of certain key events
related to the systems but also the Future Workforce concept.
Publication(s)
A key area will be to collaborate with other Commissions at FIG
Working Weeks to develop mutual understanding and output. This will
include Technical Papers on specific issues and presented by Working
Group Members and other invited experts. In addition, it is planned
that additional joint events may be organised to further the work
and to generate a short briefing note and relevant proceedings.
These may be with other NGO and IGO’s interested and working in the
area.
Timetable
WG 4.2 will participate in seminars, conferences and Technical
Sessions at FIG events each year to support and promote the
importance of surveying and surveyors for the seas and oceans. It is
likely that this initiative will have certain key events such as the
WW in Ghana 2024 to generate increased awareness and build on the
themes.
Beneficiaries
FIG member associations.
National FIG Working Week organisations and countries.
The international hydrographic surveying profession.
National surveying, charting and mapping agencies.
The effects of plastic pollution on the Earth’s oceans are
well documented, potentially catastrophic and increasing
exponentially year on year. Almost every piece of plastic ever
made is still on our planet in one form or another and UN
estimates suggest that more than 75% of all the plastic produced
since 1950 is now waste, with most of it discarded into
landfills or dumped into marine environments2 . The UN
Environment Programme (UNEP) has conservatively calculated that
each year more than 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in our
oceans. That is roughly 15 tonnes of plastic entering our oceans
every minute.
Eighty per cent of all litter in our oceans is now made of
plastic and, without action, the WWF estimates that by 2050
there will be more plastic in the sea than fish, by weight.
Because fossil fuels are heavily used to create plastics and
transport them to their points of sale, the climate change
implications of plastic production are also not insignificant.
Chair - Simon Ironside (New Zealand) Co-chair - Dr. Gordana Jakovljevic (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Specific project(s)
The
Mapping the Plastic Working Group (WG 4.3) was formed at the 2018
Istanbul Congress as a combined initiative of the FIG Young
Surveyors Network and Commission 4 (Hydrography) as FIG’s response
to this issue. The question of course is how we surveyors and
spatial science professionals can best contribute to the global
plastic battle.
Given our
specific GIS, remote sensing, hydrographic surveying, project
management and overall measurement science skillsets, we decided to
focus on better understanding the quantity and type of plastic waste
being transported in waterways before they reach our oceans. Rivers
are a recognised contributor to the ocean plastic problem. Plastic
waste floats on the surface and upper limits of rivers or settles on
banks, estuaries and coast lines during the transportation process.
Remote
sensing data from satellites and airborne platforms available in
different spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions has long been
recognised as a potentially reliable source of long-term qualitative
and quantitative information over large geographic areas. We have
focussed on harnessing the potential of remote sensing and developed
survey and processing methodologies to accurately survey/map
floating plastic in rivers and the surrounding environment at
localised ‘hot spot’ areas using data from UAV orthophotos combined
with artificial intelligence algorithms and GIS tools in near real
time.
Workshop(s)
The WG 4.3 focus over the next work cycle is to put the research
and survey methodologies we have developed into practice. To enable
us to get ‘runs on the board’ we will focus on three main objectives
i.e. resourcing, collaboration and raise awareness.
Publication(s)
Several publications and technical papers are under planning in
relation to our activities.
Timetable
WG4.3 activities are wide spread throughout the next 4 years term
2023-2026.
Beneficiaries
Resourcing We are all volunteers and donate our time and expertise to this
project willingly because we are passionate about solving this
problem. Unfortunately, a lot of the plastic ‘hotspot areas’ are in
countries whose governments don’t have the necessary budgets to fund
this work and neither do we. Therefore, a significant amount of
effort will be directed at securing funding from the donor community
to enable us to ’map the plastic’.
Collaboration Remote sensing-based identification of plastic waste combined with
near real time automated image analysis represents a breakthrough in
the global plastics battle. The algorithms and methodology we have
developed enable us to accurately map plastic waste in river systems
and coastal areas, both on land and in the water. However this is
not something that we can (or intend to) do by ourselves.
2.1 Academic
partnerships The success of our work to date is due the support of our academic
partners the University of Banja Luka (UBL), Bosnia and Herzegovina
and the University of Novi Sad (UNS), Serbia and the work of Dr
Gordana Jakovljević (UBL) our lead researcher and Prof. Miro
Govedarica (UNS). They are key members of our working group and
their enthusiasm and dedication to ongoing research has been
instrumental in developing the methodologies we are able to offer in
the fight against global plastic pollution. We intend to strengthen
this relationship over this work cylce and develop others as
circumstances arise.
2.2 Governmental & Non-governmental organisations Relationships formed with GreenHub, a dynamic environmental
Vietnamese NGO, and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) at the 2019 FIG Working
Week in Hanoi have endured and we are currently exploring ways in
which we can work with them on plastic surveys. Other relationships,
such as those as formed with the Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance
(APPA) (NZ), Ocean Cleanup (The Netherlands) and Open Oceans (US)
will be reinvigorated, and new ones developed.
2.3 FIG Young Surveyors Network As we move from research to implementation over this work cycle we
anticipate that YSN involvement in this project will increase quite
noticeably. The YSN, in conjunction with other volunteers, would be
involved in field survey work in the particular country we are
operating in. The YSN’s interconnecting networks reach into each of
the more than 100 FIG Member Associations and the FIG academic,
corporate and affiliate memberships and their assistance is crucial.
2.4 Industry
Partners Prior to the Covid pandemic, Trimble kindly donated surveying
hardware and software to the Mapping the Plastic working group to
enable field work, data ground truthing and UAV orthophoto
processing. This equipment is under the stewardship of UBL and was
used in Dr Jakovljević’s research work. We intend to reinvigorate
this relationship with Trimble and develop others as circumstances
arise.
Raise Awareness The fundamental objective of WG 4.3 (and by extension FIG itself) is
to control and ultimately eradicate plastic pollution in our oceans.
With the support of the international surveying community, our
networks within the plastics ‘movement’, our academic and industry
partners and the donor community we can contribute meaningfully to
this goal. Raising awareness of the issue is a key component of
this. As we undertake more plastics surveys, refine our methods and
techniques (and generally gain more traction) we will be able
(funding permitting) to offer support to more countries and regions
inundated with plastic pollution.
Raising awareness we involve publishing technical papers detailing
our successes (and possibly some failures), presenting our findings
at working weeks, congresses and other international fora, keeping
our work updated on the FIG website and other sites, connecting
locally with member organisations, NGO’s and concerned ’citizen
science’ groups and the media to ’get the word out’ to as many
people as possible. We will also invite our partners who work with
us to publicise this work through their networks. FIG and the international surveying community would feature
prominently in our communications, which is a great way to publicise
what we are able to achieve on this (and potentially other) issues.
We would also highlight any business opportunities for surveyors
that may arise as a result of our work.
Working Group 4.4 – Hydrospatial Domain and
Marine Administration
Policy Issues
Assist in the development of an indigenous hydrospatial data
infrastructure management (HDI/MSDI).
Assist in the development of institutional policy and
framework.
Assist in the development of conceptual and technical
standards, guidelines and practice.
Chair - Dr. Kelvin Tang Kang Wee
(Malaysia) Co-chair - Mr. Denis Hains (Canada)
Specific project(s)
The
Working Group 4.4 shall seek to promote and engage with
international government and non-governmental organisations to
increase the understanding and awareness of the importance of the
hydrospatial domain and marine administration.
Review of
national and international hydrospatial domain and marine
administration policies, standards and guidelines.
Suitable
awareness, catalyse alliances, instigate sustainable collaboration
by promoting best practices in the hydrospatial domain development
and administration.
Workshop(s)
Participate in FIG Working Weeks, Congresses, and other major
Commission 4 events.
Representing
Working Group 4.4 to other FIG Networks and Task Forces.
Participate
in seminars, conferences and technical sessions to support and
promote the importance of hydrospatial domain and marine
administration.
US Hydro,
Euro Conferences, Canadian Hydrographic Conference and etc.
Hosting a
special Session/workshop on the Hydrospatial domain during one of
the upcoming FIGWWs (Australia 2025!).
Publication(s)
FIG
Working Weeks will include technical papers and/or reports presented
by Working Group 4.4 members and other invited experts.
In addition,
it is planned that additional joint events may be organised to
further the work and to generate a short briefing note and relevant
proceedings.
FIG and
other international publications on Hydrospatial aspects.
Timetable
Working
Group 4.4 Chair will report at FIG Working Weeks (2023-2026).
Working
Group 4.4 to present a final report at FIG Congress, 2026, South
Africa.
WG4.4
activities are spread throughout the 4 years term 2023-2026.
Beneficiaries
FIG
member associations and International Hydrographic Organization
(IHO).
Sister
organisations and associated national surveying, mapping and
charting agencies and relevant international non-governmental
organisations.
Maritime and
hydrospatial domain including industry, government, education and
academia.
The Nippon
Foundation, GEBCO, Seabed 2030 Project.
The United
Nations Decade on Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
Working Group 4.5 – Climate Change induced Sea Level Rise and
Adaptation
Policy Issues
According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) each country should set its own Nationally
Determined Contribution (NDC) on the impacts, adaptation and
vulnerabilities associated with the impacts of climate change. This
is particularly relevant for coastal and island states which have
set some of their NDC related to sea level rise (SLR), prediction of
its trend according to the IPCC’s projections, and evaluation of the
impact through potential inundation of low lying coastal regions.
However, at most places, a number of problems limit successful
outcomes, mainly due to the lack of long term-tidal data, accurate
digital elevation models (DEMs) over coastal areas, etc. Since this
is a global challenge, it is preferable to develop guidelines
aligning with global standards, which can support everyone working
in this domain.
Chair - Dr. Mick Filmer (Australia) Co-chair - Dr. Ashraf Dewan (Australia)
Specific tasks and objectives
Review
existing practices, tools and techniques to monitor and analyse sea
level rise and associated issues.
Identify
existing, and further develop best practice, tools and capacity
related to the quantification and analysis of climate change
consequences such as mean sea level (MSL), local/regional relative
sea level rise estimation and coastal inundation.
Support
multidisciplinary collaboration between surveying, geospatial
sciences, hydrography and oceanography.
Use
satellite altimetry data for improved sea-level-rise estimation as
well as QA/QC for long term tidal data such as IB correction/land
subsidence, etc., and also to use high-resolution remote sensing
images, UAV sensors and GIS tools for coastal inundation modelling.
Examine
adaptation options to regional sea level rise and support research
(e.g., case studies) to determine location-specific adaptation
needs.
Establish
links and collaboration with existing sea level research groups,
building on previous work.
Explore
funding opportunities to support tasks and objectives.
Workshop(s)
Regional
capacity development workshops on Climate Change induced Sea level
rise and Adaptation.
FIG Working
Weeks.
Representing
Working Group 4.5 with other commissions (C5, C6), FIG Networks and
FIG Task Force on Climate Compass.
Publication(s)
FIG publications on best practices in SLR estimation, coastal
subsidence and adaptation.
Some scientific papers and presentations.
Timetable
WG4.5
activities will be spread throughout the 2023-2026 period. Project
work is subject to funding and in-kind time contributions from
working group members.
Beneficiaries
United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Small island
nations through mitigation and adaptation measures for relative sea
level rise induced.
Multiple
stakeholders (e.g., governments, research organisations, etc.)
Co-operation with Other Commissions and organisations
The proposed Commission 4 activities having certain overlaps with
the other FIG Commissions such as C1,C2,C5,C6,C8, several Task
Forces and its Networks, therefore it’s good to have a closer
collaborations with them.
Co-operation with United Nation Organisations, Sister
Associations and other Partners
International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO).
International Maritime Organization (IMO).
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC).
Nippon Foundation, GEBCO, Seabed 2030 Project.
United Nations Decade on Ocean Science for Sustainable
Development.
Commission Officers
Commission Chair
Dr. MDEK Gunathilaka (Sri Lanka), erandakan [at] geo.sab.ac.lk
Vice Chair of Administration
Mr. Gordon Johnston (UK), gordontjohnston1 [at] gmail.com
Chair of Working Group 4.1 - Hydrographic Standards and
Guidelines
Mr. Geoff Lawes (Australia), geoff.lawes [at] revelare.com.au
Co-chair: Ms. Tanja Dufek (Germany), tanja.dufek [at] hcu-hamburg.de
Chair of Working Group 4.2 - Sustainable Oceans and
Hydrography
Mr. Gordon Johnston (UK), gordontjohnston1 [at] gmail.com
Co-chair: TBC
Chair of Working Group 4.3 - Mapping the Plastic
Mr. Simon Ironside (New Zeeland), SIronside [at] linz.govt.nz
Co-chair: Dr. Gordana Jakovljevic (Bosnia and Herzegovina),
gordana.jakovljevic [at] aggf.unibl.org
Chair of Working Group 4.4 - Hydrospatial and Marine
Administration
Dr. Kelvin Tang Kang Wee (Malaysia), tkwkelvin2 [at] live.utm.my
Co-chair: Mr. Denis Hains (Canada), dhains [at] h2i.ca
Chair of Working Group 4.5 – Climate Change induced
Sea-Level-Rise and Adaptation
Dr. Mick Filmer (Australia), M.Filmer [at] curtin.edu.au
Co-chair: Dr. Ashraf Dewan (Australia), A.Dewan [at] curtin.edu.au
Chair of FIG Commission 4
Dr. M.D.E.K. Gunathilaka
erandakan [at] geo.sab.ac.lk
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