Recognition award for LINZ geospatial expert

The Australasian Women in Emergencies (AWE) Network has recognised LINZ Senior Geospatial Specialist, Susan Shaw, with an award for mentoring, supporting, and encouraging other women in the emergency management community.

The annual awards recognise achievements in the emergency management and disaster resilience sector across New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific. 

Susan’s award speaks to the work she does to support the sector during a response, but also the significant contribution she and her colleagues in our Location Information function make in ‘peace time’.  

Susan sees her role as providing value in three key areas: improving crucial data in peace time to support emergency managers and decisionmakers; activating in a declared emergency to collect, coordinate and host valuable data; and being an active leader in the Geospatial Emergency Management Aotearoa (GEMA) community which supports the emergency management system.

Her leadership role in progressing Key Datasets for Resilience and Climate Change under a blue sky empowers and supports emergency managers and decisionmakers when adverse events happen, as they have the latest datasets right at their fingertips.

When emergencies are declared in New Zealand, the LINZ Geospatial Duty Team activates to monitor the changing situation, often coordinating the collection and hosting of remote sensing data such as satellite imagery, radar, and aerial imagery.  

This data is vital for situational awareness during disasters and helps support emergency managers to focus their attention where it is needed the most.

Even in the midst of emergency situations, Susan always has one eye on future dataset improvements to be made and drives these workstreams which continue to deliver better outcomes for the emergency management and disaster resilience sector and the wider geospatial community.  

This AWE Day we celebrate your contribution to the sector Susan and look forward to seeing how data improvements will make a difference for New Zealand in future.

LINZ works with Stats NZ, NZTA, KiwiRail, NIWA and MBIE on the key data improvements.  

Read more about the Australasian Women in Emergencies Network