The 2020 Geography in Government Awards opened for nominations at the beginning of the year, seeking examples of excellence in geography across the range of disciplines and organisations. This is the second year we have held the awards and all the judges were pleased by the outstanding quality and range of examples the profession can offer. Reading the nominations it was very clear that geography in government is a broad profession with excellence across the public sector and a profession which is full of dedicated and talented individuals.
Although we’re unable to host the award ceremony in person this year, I would like to take this opportunity to share the short listed nominations for each category. We are planning to run a virtual ceremony in the near future where the category winners will be announced, along with the overall winner. This overall winner is invited to the hugely prestigious Royal Geographical Society Awards, recognising the impact and importance of geography across the public sector.
So, here are the shortlisted nominations for the category of "Excellence in geo-visualisation & cartography", along with a short description of the work in alphabetical order.
Defence Geographic Centre (DGC), Ministry of Defence (MoD)
The nominee used ArcGIS to combine digital terrain models, land cover, hydrology, geology, soils, climate, and vehicle specification data to generate cross country movement models. The models and more particularly the methodology, have been stored as ArcGIS tools and as textual Standard Operating Procedures and so are shared within their immediate team and provided to Geo Staffs outside of DGC. The work is evidenced by feedback, and requests for support in understanding and generating Cross Country Movement Models from UK and international defence customers.
Natural England
Monitoring Engagement with the Natural Environment (MENE) is the largest survey of its kind which has collected a decade’s worth of data on people’s engagement with the natural environment. This has focused on individual visits and wider visiting habits such as frequency, motivations and barriers. With almost 500,000 respondents the MENE team have spent the last year developing innovative tools to help users access, analyse, view and present the data with confidence.
Office for National Statistics
HM Government’s Democratic Engagement Plan (2017) set out a 5-year programme of democratic engagement and voter registration activity and was designed to tackle democratic exclusion and outline how the government would increase participation among under-registered groups. As part of this programme, the government committed to produce an Atlas of Democratic Variation, drawing on a variety of electoral data. Over 50 maps were produced of which 21 were included in the published atlas.
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