2003 News Archive
Program 4 LEME Team Receives Geoscience Australia Award
FOR: "ACHIEVING RESULTS IN SCIENCE"
Awarded to the CRC LEME Program 4 team at GA - Ken Lawrie, Richard
Lane, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Dave Gibson, Heike Apps, John Wilford,
Anne Riesz, Penny Kilgour, Ross Brodie, Matt Gray, Colin Pain Patty
Please, Jon Clarke and Jane Coram. The graduates involved are Amy
Kernich and Karol Czarnota.
Program 4 Leader Ken Lawrie would like to
also acknowledge and thank other key Program 4 LEME researchers
- Tim Munday (CSIRO Exploration and Mining), KP Tan (ANU), Andy
Herczeg and colleagues at CSIRO L&W and Paul Wilkes (Curtin
University) "who have played a very significant role in all of this,
but could not be nominated, as this was restricted to GA staff".
The Award was presented by Chief Executive Neil Williams at the
Geoscience Australia Annual General Meeting on 12 December 2003.
GA CITATION:
In the past 12 months this Team has performed beyond expectations
in a difficult client and stakeholder environment. The team have
been leaders in the debate on salinity mapping, and have gained
broad peer acceptance (National Salinity Mapping Review), for
a multi-disciplinary system's approach to salinity and groundwater
mapping and management. This broad peer acceptance was achieved
despite the loss of BRS from the CRC, and the negative publicity
associated with the previous marketing of the 'Ultrasound of the
Earth' approach to salinity mapping.
The Team's performance has received wide praise from peer groups
such as the Land Use Advisory Council and the CRC LEME Review
Panel for their high calibre and innovative science outputs, achieved
within budget and on time. Program 4 staff have delivered over
50 scientific reports and publications in the last 12 months,
and given more than 80 technical presentations in that time. GA
staff have had leading roles in 15 of the 19 projects within CRC
LEME Program 4.
Of particular note has been the success of projects in the following
areas:
• The Cost Effective Airborne Geophysics Project which
has demonstrated the potential for order of magnitude reductions
in the costs of acquisition of AEM surveys.
• Production of innovative constrained AEM inversion products
for the Lower Balonne and Riverland Projects. These products have
set new benchmarks for calibration standards for AEM surveys,
while the overall science products for these projects have set
new standards for the baseline science required to inform public
and private investment in natural resource management;
• Innovative products in Upland landscapes that demonstrates
the importance of regolith geoscience, within a multi-disciplinary
arena, to inform on salt storage and salt export in these landscapes;
• Innovation in regolith landform and 3D regolith mapping
products for natural resource management, particularly in the
Lower Balonne and Bland palaeo-valley Projects, which are providing
crucial new inputs into surface water-groundwater interaction
models.
|
