Land Information Systems and Terrain Intelligence

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LAND INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TERRAIN INTELLIGENCE:
It’s about Eurobodalla! It’s about Benson & Bigot!
Reflections of Dr Robert (Bob) Williams
Topographic surveyor and cartographer
Through Five Decades of Experience and Knowledge
2020
Digital transition to Land Information Systems / Multi-Purpose Cadastre in
Australia has been slow noting that the issue was addressed, and prototyped,
half a century ago.
Land Use on the South Coast of New South Wales
“In March 1972 the N.S.W. Government through their then Department of the
Environment invited the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO) to participate in a joint study of land use on the South
Coast of the State. CSIRO was asked to undertake a pilot survey of resources
in the area to provide a rational basis for planning decisions on a wide
variety of land uses.
Part of the reason for the request was undoubtedly concern over the
increasing extent of conflicts and differences of opinion as to how the land of
the region should be used. Apart from localized conflicts the general trends in
land use causing discussion were and are:
v Subdivision and loss of productive agricultural holdings;
v Increasing urbanization of recreation areas together with the effects of
this on the environment;
v Extension of national parks and subsequent loss of timber resources.
In addition to conflicts about what land uses should be and where, there were
and are conflicts about how these uses permitted should be managed. Here
discussion centres around intensity of use (e.g. foreshore degradation and
erosion) and degree of managerial control (e.g. fire control in national parks).
In June 1972 the then Division of Land Research was invited to submit to the
CSIRO Executive a proposal for a research project relevant to this problem.
The problem was obviously part of the question of how the Australian land
base should be used and was therefore appropriate for the Division. The then
current Divisional research goals were however:
v Specification of Australia-wide possibilities and limitations for a range
of primary productive land uses, and
v Identification and measurement of the biological functions of non-urban
land.
The two-pronged approach then being followed involved the development of

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more powerful methods of land data acquisition, storage and retrieval, and the
development of mathematical models of land productivity and bio-physical
processes suitable for broad areas.
The South Coast question appeared to present a radically different type of
land use problem, being concerned with:
v All functions of land, not just its primary productivity and biological
function;
v Land use in a highly dynamic context;
v The balancing of existing and new ways of using land rather than new
technologies of land use;
v A specific, relatively small area of N.S.W”
(“Land Use on the South Coast of New South Wales”, CSIRO, 1978).
The study area included New South Wales’ Eurobodalla Shire.

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“The report is organized into four volumes. Volume 1 (General Report) is
designed to stand by itself to a large extent in that it contains a general
description of the study area and summaries of all chapters in the other three
volumes. Readers with specialized interests in particular land uses and
sectors of the environment should refer to specific chapters in other volumes
for matters of detail. Volume 1 also contains our overview of the land use
problem as gleaned from the literature and our own conceptualization of how
we have viewed land use and land use change (Part 1). Part 2 of Volume 1
discusses the techniques used for acquiring, storing, manipulating and using
data for land use planning purposes. Part 3 provides a general description of
the study area. Part 4 is a detailed demonstration of the way in which
planning data can be used to generate land use options for the study area, to

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choose amongst options and to appraise the results of such choice. Part 5 is
an 'in-house' evaluation of the project. Accompanying this volume are three
separate maps showing the land systems into which the study area was
divided, present land use in the area and the land use options in the area
remaining after eliminating those which are clearly infeasible, uneconomic or
environmentally degrading. An Appendix to Volume 1 lists the Technical
Memoranda available on the project. These present results in greater detail
than is possible in this report.
Volume 2 (Bio-physical Background Studies) contains eight chapters
describing the physical and biotic nature of the study area. The level of
presentation is moderately technical insofar as these studies were intended to
allow a spatially disaggregated description of each of the approximately 4000
basic spatial units into which the 6000 km2 study area has been divided.
Volume 3 (Socio-economic Background Studies) contains six chapters
describing human presence and activity in Eurobodalla Shire, the local
government authority contained in and occupying two-thirds of the study area.
Description is generally at a lower spatial resolution than that of the bio-
physical studies. These chapters are intended to provide information required
to formulate land use policy options for subsequent incorporation into planning
procedures.
Volume 4 (Land Function Studies) describes 12 different ways in which land is
used or functions to facilitate the survival and development of the study area
was immediately dependent community and the community at large. These
studies have as an important emphasis the nomination and application of
criteria for aiding the identification of land either unacceptable or differentially
suitable for particular uses”.
Terrain Pattern Map
Computer Methods – Bruce Graydon Cook. The study area was divided
into nearly 4,000 regions (functional units) on the basis of uniform bio-physical

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pattern and socio-economic status.
Two computer data bases were established: one storing the map of the
regions boundaries (the map base), the other storing the bio-physical and
socio-economic descriptors attributed to each region (the attribute base). The
data bases were linked to allow functions of the attribute values, constituting
land use suitability or exclusion criteria, to be displayed as thematic maps.
The lists of data items held within the records of the attribute base are shown

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in the three lists below.
Acknowledgement:
Bruce Graydon Cook, BSc (Mathematics and Physics) joined CSIRO
(Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Division of
Land Research (DLR) in 1967 to work on methodology of land resource
survey.
He became DLR nominee on ANU-hosted Automated Cartography Study
Group(ACSG).
Reference:
M.P.Austin,J.J.Basinski, K.D.Cocksand J.R.Ive, “South Coast Project : Pre-
Print Of Chapters Describing Land Use Planning Methodology”, Technical
Memorandum 77/19 November 1977, CSIRO Division of Land Use Research
Canberra.
Cook (1967) – “A Computer Representation of Plane Region Boundaries”,
The Australian Computer Journal, November, 1967
Cook (1977) – “The Structural and Algorithmic Basis of a Geographic Data
Base", Harvard papers on geographic information systems: Laboratory for
Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, Graduate School of Design,
Harvard University. Geoffrey Dutton, editor.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/visionary-bruce-cook-robert-bob-
williams/

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CSIRO, in responding to their goal of addressing “Specification of Australia-
wide possibilities and limitations for a range of primary productive land uses”,
selected South Australia as their project area towards their Australia-wide
goal.

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The Environments of South Australia
In 1975 the Division of Land Use Research, the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation developed a methodology to organise
physiographic and environmental regions and produced the most
comprehensive study of this type undertaken in Australia in South Australia.
The seven volumes of “The Environments of South Australia” contain the
environmental information that was prepared for a study entitled “A feasibility
study for an ecological study of Australia”. This study was commissioned by
the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Conservation in 1975
and funded jointly by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization (CSIRO) and that Department and its successor (Department of
Environment, Housing and Community Development). It consisted of two
tasks to be completed within two years:
a.to devise and demonstrate a suitable methodology for mapping and
describing major plant communities, wildlife habitats, present type and
intensity of land use, ecosystems and landscape, using a test area of
410,000km2
of southern South Australia; and
b.to assess the suitability of LANDSAT imagery for this purpose”.
Although in 1977 the environmental mapping and description programme was
extended to include all of South Australia, the final Australia-wide programme
was never continued. Furthermore, the South Australia volumes were not
digitised.
Laut, P., P.C.Heyligers, G. Keig,
E.Löffler, C.Margules and R.M.Scott
(1977). Environments of South
Australia, Handbook and 7 volumes,
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organization, Canberra.
In 1976, CSIRO undertook a military mapping study and used the same
methodology as the NSW South Coast project.

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Trafficability at Shoalwater Bay
In 1976 the Woodland Ecology Unit in CSIRO’s Division of Land Use
Research undertook a trafficabilty study in the Shoalwater Bay (SWB)
Training Area (north of Rockhampton, Queensland) at the request of the
Department of Defence.
“The study aimed to address :
a. The single most effective management strategy is to conduct exercises
during the dry period on the training area. This is consistently
August/September.
b. To minimize bushfire hazards and erosion effects caused by bushfire /
vehicle interactions the area to be used for the exercise should be
control burned as early in the year as possible, i.e. early June. By
burning early in the year intensive fires will by minimized and the
vegetative cover will have time to recover.
c. Areas to be used intensively, i.e. beach landing points or other
assembly areas, should be examined in detail by a soils/vegetation
scientist to assess possible adverse impacts.
d. The general area to be used should be examined quantitatively before
and after the exercise to assist in future trafficabilty and related
ecological problem assessments”.
The report defines ‘no go’ areas based on assessment of environmental
fragility including all sand mass areas, all mangrove areas, all areas of
rainforest and CSIRO experimental areas.
The report defines areas which will present vehicular mobility problems
through a terrain pattern map being an area with relief amplitude and drainage
density; and a land systems map which contains information on geology,
soils, vegetation and topography.
Terrain Pattern map

Cretaceous – Bayfield, Pyri Pyri and other
Granites – Granite, Adamellite, Granodiorite

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I, as SSGT Robert Williams, was detached from the Directorate of Survey –
Army to CSIRO’s Division of Land Use Research (LUR) in 1978. I digitized the
terrain patterns and used procedures developed by LUR to compile overlays
for a number of themes.
A special Trafficability Overlay Topographic map was published for use in
Kangaroo Exercises held at Shoalwater Bay, Queensland.

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The Kangaroo Exercises often involved an “invasion” by US Marines at
Sabina Point.
Sabina Point is the most prominent
headland in the southern half of
Shoalwater Bay. It protrudes 700 m
north-east into the bay, but is only
10 m high. Extensive intertidal rock
flats lie bay-ward of the point, while
two sandy beaches and fronting
tidal flats lie to either side.
In preparation for this major exercise a number of special map products were
produced. These included route / corridor enhanced ortho-photo maps and a
special beach landing map at Sabina Point. The beach landing area included
ground surface composition and gradients. The map included a perspective
view from offshore.
I worked at Army Survey Regiment, Bendigo, Victoria and supervised the
mapping task.

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The SWB Special Topographic Map had become more than a traditional map.
It had become an ‘intelligence’ product.
In 1981, I (then LT Robert
Williams) was Acting Second in
Command of Cartographic
Squadron in Army Survey
Regiment.
The Officer in Command was US
Army Major David Bowen on
exchange posting to Australia.
David and I developed the
definition (right) for a Digital
Topographic Database.
David had previously been on the
academic staff in the Department
of Geography and Computer
Science, United States Military
Academy, West Point, USA.
Major Bowen’s replacement was Major John Charland whose previous
posting was also on the academic staff in the Department of Geography and
Computer Science, United States Military Academy, West Point, USA.
Major Charland gave a presentation to the Austra Carto – International
Cartographic Association (ICA) Conference, in Perth 1984.
John gave future applications of the database as:
v “Permit the transportation Officer to point to a bridge and have the
system return the width, allowable load and structural components of
the bridge
v Permit the Medical Officer to point to all hospitals in an area and have
the number of beds currently available
v Permit the Commander to point to a geographical area and have the
system return enemy unit designations, location, strength and
equipment status, and have the system designed to permit data base
update so that the information returned is current and accurate”

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In 1985 the Director of the Royal Australian Survey
Corps, COL Alex Laing addressed the corps’ annual
conference and asked the corps “to look at itself:
Ø More than just classical surveying and
mapping
Ø Military terrain intelligence is the corps’
business and should be the way-ahead for the
corps into the 21st
century”
Unfortunately, just weeks before this conference there was a change to the
project that would have enabled the information infrastructure to be installed.
Army Project 42 (Automap 2) was over time and over budget in the acquisition
process and project managers, both military and civilian, needed to find
“savings”.
A naïve decision was made to remove the RDMS (Relational Data Base
Management System) and replace it with a link to a feature-coding catalogue.
That decision meant that Automap would remain a traditional mapping
system.
THIS CAPABILTY DEVELOPMENT (as envisioned in 1985)
HAS YET TO OCCUR!
Returning the SWB maps, I presume that Alex Laing had visited UK Military
Survey in London and became aware of the D-Day Invasion Maps.
So this story is worth telling!
BENSON – BIGOT - [D-Day Invasion Maps]
The project to map the northern French coastline and up to 60 miles inland at
a scale of 1:25,000 was called ‘BENSON’. It was a massive undertaking; over
1,000 separate map sheets had to be produced in little over twelve months.
Spitfires from 140 Squadron RAF flew 342 sorties over northern France
between 24 July 1942 and 17 August 1943 to gain the initial complete
photographic cover of the area.
An Air Survey Group was formed consisting of six newly formed General Field
Survey Sections. They assembled the ground control and photography, and
produced the photogrammetric control for each photograph. This data was
passed, in blocks of 25 map sheets, to the UK-based Military Survey units
who plotted the detail and contours, and produced fair drawings ready for
exposure directly onto the printing plates. As the project progressed, so
methods improved and 660 Engineer Topographic Battalion of the US Army
took over a share of the work.
The map specification was simple but very detailed. For example, all field
boundaries had to be shown which proved invaluable during the subsequent
invasion of France.

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The BENSON maps became the base for the classified mapping program with
CODEWORD BIGOT.
The BIGOT maps and documents were created in isolated cocoons of
secrecy. One was hidden in Selfridges department store in London. BIGOT
workers entered and left Selfridges by a back door, many of them knowing
only that they were delivering scraps of information that somehow contributed
to the war effort. Others with BIGOT clearances worked on Allied staffs
scattered around London and southern England. So restricted was the BIGOT
project that when King George visited a command ship and asked what was
beyond a curtained compartment, he was politely turned away because, as a
sentinel officer later said, "Nobody told me he was a Bigot."

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Detail from GSGS 4347, sheet Cruelly 1:25,000
Overprinted initially with ‘defences’ in blue and the overprinted again with later information in
orange; the ‘Stop Press Edition’
But nothing was more secret—or more vital to Operation Neptune—than the
mosaic of Allied intelligence reports that cartographers and artists transformed
into the multihued and multilayered BIGOT maps. On them were portrayed
details of Hitler's vaunted Atlantic Wall, a network of coastal defenses
designed to repel invaders.
To discover what the Allied invaders faced, American, British, and French
operatives risked their lives—and sometimes gave their lives—in the process
of filling in the BIGOT maps. Revelations about Normandy's undulating
seafloor came from frogmen who also got sand samples on beaches patrolled
by German sentries. Such BIGOT map notations as "antitank ditch around
strongpoint" or "hedgehogs 30 to 35 feet (9 to 10 meters) apart" were often
the gifts of French patriots. French labourers conscripted by the Nazis paced
distances between obstacles or kept track of German troop movements. A
housepainter, hired to redecorate German headquarters in Caen, stole a
blueprint of Atlantic Wall fortifications.
French Resistance networks passed on precious bits of information,
particularly the condition of bridges and canal locks. Wireless telegraph
operators transmitted in bursts to evade German radio-detection teams. Other
messages got to England in capsules, borne by homing pigeons that the

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Royal Air Force had delivered to French Resistance agents in cages
parachuted into German-occupied Normandy. Germans, aware of the winged
spies, used marksmen and falcons to bring them down. But thousands of
messages got through.
"The Bigot map", two-part map, was used by invasion forces to plan and
launch the attack. Its level of detail is both a stunning accomplishment, as a
piece of cartography. Ditches, man-made barriers, and gun encampments
are laid out in detail. The reverse side of each map had detailed hourly
currents, beach gradients, and tidal stages.

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References:
Yolande Hodson and Alan Gordon
An Illustrated History of 250 Years
of Military Survey (1747-1997)
“This booklet has been prepared as a memento
of some of the landmarks in Military Survey’s
long and distinguished history. A full, scholarly
history has yet to be written; the exhibition, map
display and this small publication offer no more
than a brief gaze at the past, a glance at the
present, and a glimpse of the future”.
Brigadier PR Wildman OBE
Director of Military Survey, 1997
https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/dday.html
The Map Makers – The D-Day
Invasion
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmn7lw AN AMAZING VIDEO
The Odyssey so far!
The first topic was “Land Use on the South Coast of New South Wales”.
This section notes the importance of Strategic Policy. The requirement
intended to “provide a rational basis for planning decisions on a wide variety
of land uses”
The computer system was possibly the first Land Information System at a
regional/shire level.

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The Environments of South Australia project demonstrated that the
scientific method to describe landscapes and landforms could be used at the
state level.
The project included a suitable methodology for mapping and describing
major plant communities, wildlife habitats, present type and intensity of land
use, ecosystems and landscape. The project also assessed the suitability of
LANDSAT imagery for this purpose.
Trafficability at Shoalwater Bay project demonstrated that terrain analysis
was suitable for military operations.
Surely, this type of product could be developed and used in emergency
management systems for response to natural disasters, e.g. fires.
Note regarding the formal qualification of officers: The US Exchange officers,
Major David Bowen and Major John Charland, had been on the academic
staff in the Department of Geography and Computer Science, United States
Military Academy, West Point, USA. The department had integrated core
disciplines of Geography and Computer Science.
I received the award of Bachelor of Arts in Computing Studies (Cartography
major) at the Canberra College of Advanced Education – a unique course
integrating cartography into a computer science program.
BENSON – BIGOT
The D-Day mapping project was a stunning accomplishment, as a piece of
cartography.
The compilation and production of the Benson and Bigot maps required a
comprehensive set of skills and expertise. Furthermore, the maps covered the
littoral area and with amazing detail.
Combined the D-Day invasion maps were an amazing cartographic feat.
And now on to Managing the Environmental Crisis –
We have recently experienced two major natural disasters: the Black Summer
fires on the east coast of Australia in 2019-2020, and the East Coast Floods
on 2022.
The Black Summer forest fires of 2019–2020 burned more than 24 million
hectares, directly causing 33 deaths and almost 450 more from smoke
inhalation.
The 2022 Eastern Australia floods was one of Australia’s worst flood
disasters with a series of floods that occurred in South East Queensland and
parts of coastal New South Wales in eastern Australia (including parts of
Sydney) causing 22 deaths with billions of dollars in damage with tens of
thousands of houses destroyed.

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The “knowledge Wall” is located in the NSW State Operations Centre (below).

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The photo above shows that the NSW Sate Operations Centre has access to
a vast amount of information from a plethora of sources.
This represents a major information management issue; the failure to develop
a geographic information system with whole-of-government – whole-of-nation
capabilities.
Two years on and briefings on ‘catastrophic’ floods are still be given via paper
maps and documents.

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In any event, these presentations are ‘historical’ in that the incidents being
briefed on have already happened.
We appear to being a long way off from having ‘real-time’ and ‘predictive’
systems.
“It is particularly important that Australia develop a
capability in this field because large gaps exist in our
knowledge of our own environmental and natural
resources. …
… For the future, I believe that cartographers should be
thinking of a broadly defined concept for the operational
use of modern sensors, the full range of data processing
equipment and methodology, and large scale
communication devices receiving input from space,
airborne and terrestrial platforms for the purpose of
carrying out surveys of the earth’s surface, monitoring the
environment, and classifying and compacting the
information in environmental data banks so that real-time
or near real-time information may be provided when and
where it is required”.
Actually that quote is from Professor Desmond O’Connor’s Keynote Address
to the Second Australian Cartographic Conference in Adelaide titled ‘Meeting
the Environmental Crisis’. The year was 1976.
AN INTERESTING CV
In 1954 Desmond O’Connor was appointed a Lecturer
in Civil Engineering at the University of New South
Wales and from 1959-1963 he was a Senior Lecture in
Civil Engineering at the same institution. He resigned in
1963 to commence as a Research Engineer with a US
Army Engineering Agency.
From 1967- 1971 Desmond O’Connor served as
Associate Director, then Director, at the US Army
Engineer Topographic Laboratories Research Institute.
Before taking up his position at Murdoch University in
1973 Desmond O’Connor was Chief, Environmental
Sciences Division, US Army Research Office.

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Conclusion
Surely with extreme events such as the Black Summer fires, the East Coast
Floods of 2022 and COVID19 (a pandemic and one of contemporary threats
to national security) occurring regularly it is time to review our national
capability.
This article was titled Land Use Planning and Terrain Intelligence. Both
initiatives emanated from political direction:
v Land use study from the New South Wales government in 1972 and
was intended to “provide a rational basis for planning decisions on a
wide variety of land uses”;
v A Department of Defence study for “Trafficability Study at Shoalwater
Bay” Training Area – Terrain intelligence.
The sub-title of the article is “Eurododalla” and “Benson & Bigot”. Eurobodalla
is the name of the New South Wales shire that is included in the study.
Benson and Bigot are the names of the component part of the D-Day invasion
maps in World War II. This example D-Day mapping describes just how
complex and detailed mapping for intelligence preparation of the battlefield is
and the breath of Cartography.
The illustration below shows a Geospatial Information Infrastructure. The box
on the top-left refers to Policy and provides the “needs assessment” and the
box on the bottom-left refers to “operational need”- terrain intelligence /
decision supports systems, etc.
There are research topics identified within the infrastructure that remain
inadequately addressed after almost two decades. We need a review!

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Tertiary Qualifications
BA (Computing Studies) – Carto major
Canberra College of Advanced Education
VISION AND INNOVATION – An Enlightening Time
https://www.slideshare.net/RobertBobWilliams/vision-
and-innovation-bob-williams-1976-84
MSc (Cartography)
University of Wisconsin -Madison
CARTOGRAPHY: A communication Infrastructure
https://www.slideshare.net/RobertBobWilliams/cartogra
phy-a-communication-infrastructure
Doctor of Philosophy
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES - ADFA
ANALYSIS OF GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: A
COGNITIVE APPROACH
https://www.unsworks.unsw.edu.au/primo-
explore/fulldisplay/unsworks_55053/UNSWORKS

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