ESRI Dashboard / Water management

📝 Drinking water resource monitoring project in New Caledonia

Context: As part of my role within an environmental association, I was responsible for the information systems and geomatics projects division. I was given a simple mission: to design a territorial dashboard for monitoring the drinking water resource across New Caledonia, for a public institution (DAVAR).

Objectives:

• Identify, formalize and produce around ten relevant geographic indicators for monitoring the resource.
• Build a sustainable and reproducible technical solution, scalable in the long term.
• Automate the processing and aggregation of vector geographic data (provided by the contracting authority).

Role and actions:

• Design and development of a scripted geospatial processing framework (Python/GDAL, YAML), with geometric intersection, filtering, aggregation steps, etc.
• Structuring data according to a bronze / silver / gold logic (Data Lakehouse model adapted to geographic data).
• Setting up a data catalog and standardized models to facilitate multi-scale analysis.
• Explicit refusal of manual processing (QGIS-type), in favor of an industrialized, reproducible and documented system.
• Constant dialogue with public partners to refine indicators and anticipate future uses, applying an agile approach.

Results and impacts:

• Successful delivery of the first version of the dashboard and indicators.
• Adoption of the framework as the technical foundation for all future environmental projects of the observatory.
• Significant time savings in subsequent projects and greater reliability of processing.
• Building a culture of automated and maintainable processing within the team.

Lessons learned:

• The importance of imposing a clear and robust technical vision, even when it diverges from existing practices.
• Training and pedagogy are key factors in getting teams to adopt more advanced technical tools.
• A well-considered methodological choice can generate a lasting leverage effect at the scale of an organization.

Skills used

Technologies used