 James Cook University has a special focus on the tropics, we're situated in the tropics and we have a large range of data collections associated with the tropics of high value. Some of those include VecNet which is a malaria based data set, Mangrove Watch which is a series of images around the coastlines of tropical Australia and in fact South East Asia and also state of the tropics. We're bringing together a lot of statistical data to understand the status of the tropical world. VecNet is a consortium of institutions all around the world that was formed in 2011 to come together in solving part of the problem of malaria eradication and one of the outcomes of that was a recommendation that there needed to be some tools that allowed all sorts of different users in different parts of malaria, the malaria community, to access data and some modeling tools to use in decision making. One of the major tool sets that VecNet provides to users online all around the world is a digital library and a data warehouse. So this brings together lots of different data sources in an easily accessible and freely available online resource. So people working in countries that have malaria problems are asking questions like what can I do, what are the range of interventions that are available to me, which of those should I be using to get the best outcome? So for example they could use the modeling tools to ask a question like if I get people sleeping under bed nets what effect will that have on reducing malaria? In contrast if I did some spraying inside houses of insecticide onto the walls so that there was a long-term effect what effect would that have in comparison to getting them to sleep under bed nets because each of these have different costs or another question might be well what if I did both? Is that going to double the impact and really speed up effectiveness? So the modeling tools that are accessible on the VecNet interface allow people to ask those kinds of questions and make better decisions, better informed decisions on what to do with their resources. For example we could have a situation where a researcher was sitting here in Cairns trying to understand how to assist in eradicating malaria in one of our Indian neighbours such as Papua New Guinea and they may have access to some modeling frameworks and know that there's a range of data that they need to be able to utilize that. So to start off with they might need some data on weather, climate, demographics etc. And someone who's working in the field may not know how to access that data very easily even if it is openly available it's not their skill set to know how to go and get it quickly. So using our system they can get that data, it defaults to that data in the system so they don't have to go out and find it, it reduces that step for them. James Cook University through our Tropical Data Hub project what we're trying to do is expose of many high value tropical data sets as we can. We know the tropical world is very interconnected so what happens in a coastal environment may actually be the result of something that's happened further in land, what happens in a reef may result from something that's happening on a coastline. So it's very important that we get open access to these data sets and can look across them for correlations and interactions between environments. No environment actually exists independent of any other environment everything's interconnected. So interconnected data sets are a critical component of understanding what's happening. Mangrove Watch is an unusual project it involves not just data collection from professional researchers and scientists but it's also a citizen science project where people from the community can take their own video data, contribute that to the repository and build up this understanding over time of coastal changes. So in Mangrove Watch video cameras are used to record the coastline both from boats and from helicopters. The data from those image files are extracted and they're categorized, the GPS locations are taken and so people can go back and understand that coastline at that point in time. Over time you build up a picture or a status of the change in coastline over the time whether that's human influences or environmental influences. If mangroves disappear so do those fish species and so do those economies subsequently collapse. So it's very important that we understand the influences of mangrove health and what we can do to improve that health and what we have to not do to prevent the mangroves decline. So the Mangrove Watch is going to be available free and open for planners, for developers, governments, industry to actually look at and understand the impacts of their developments not just in the short term but the medium and long term as well. Open access to data is absolutely critical. There's no point in one research program gathering lots of high value data and not being able to share it with the next person. Over time in the environment we're looking at changes in the environment so to do that we need to understand what our baselines are. It is very important in a mangrove and coastal environment where weather events and human development really lead to quite rapid changes to the environment. Open data is a solution to that problem.