VegMachine.net. online land cover analysis for the Australian rangelands

This paper documents the development and use of the VegMachine.net land cover monitoring tool. From 2002 to 2015, VegMachine® software was used by government agencies, natural resource management (NRM) groups and individual pastoralists in northern Australia to assess and benchmark vegetation cover levels. In 2016 the VegMachine.net website was launched to build a wider user base and assure service continuity. Users can now graph historical (1990–) cover on one or more user defined areas of interest (AOI), produce comprehensive paddock-by-paddock property monitoring reports, and view a range of land cover raster images through the website map panel. In its first 32 months of operation 913 users logged 1604 sessions on the website and more than 1000 of the website’s most comprehensive monitoring reports were distributed to users. Levels of use varied; 26% of users (n = 237) have used the website more than once, and within this group a smaller set of regular users (n = 36) have used the site more than five times, in many cases to provide analyses to multiple clients. We outline four case studies that document the significant impact VegMachine.net has had on users including graziers, government agencies, NRM groups and researchers. We also discuss some possible paths forward that could widen the user base and improve retention of first time users.

ARTiMon Monitoring Tool, The Time Domains

This work is related to our monitoring tool called ARTiMon for the online property monitoring of discrete and continuous systems. This paper presents the syntax and the semantics of the current input language of ARTiMon. Because this is not always well understood by users, and also because it grounds the ability of ARTiMon to check properties online, in this tool paper a particular focus is accorded to the domain definition of time functions used to interpret terms of the language.