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The Department of Sustainability and Environment are responsible for monitoring and reporting on net changes in native vegetation coverage. As a referral authority for development applications requesting clearing of native vegetation, DSE plays a key role in ensuring that there is no net loss in native vegetation quality as the result of development. Given the large number of people across the state involved in responding to applications within DSE and local government, the efficient coordination of requests and monitoring of the outcomes is a major challenge. To assist management of requests and reporting of outcomes, Spatial Vision was contracted to design and develop the Native Vegetation Permit Tracking System (NVPTS).

DSE has a responsibility to provide timely responses to all development applications referred. In 2001, Spatial Vision developed the Statutory Planning Case Management System (SPCMS) for DSE to improve the internal coordination and processing efficiencies of responses. NVPTS was a major enhancement to the SPCMS

The NVPTS tracks all applications for vegetation clearing, enabling immediate exchange of case registration, progress tracking and decisions with local government via a secure extranet interface.

The NVPTS assists DSE officers in the determination of the impact of a clearing application and the construction of ‘development requirements’ that ensure that no net loss of native vegetation quality occurs. NVPTS provides a sophisticated spatial tool set that enables users to easily record the spatial extent of proposed areas for clearing. The spatial tool then interrogates key corporate data sets to identify potential impacts of an application and presents the results via reports within the management workflows and mapping outputs.  The integrated spatial functionality is delivered using Spatial Vision’s ‘Tractus’ product.

Through the implementation of the NVPTS enhancement to SPCMS, the time taken to process development application referrals will be reduced and just as importantly, the methods used to process referrals and assess the impact of native vegetation clearing will be consistent and uniform.