Published by: Kirsten McKenna and Alison Ollerenshaw (30 Apr 2014)
Yesterday, ABC Radio’s statewide program ‘Country Hour’ aired an interview with Federation University Australia’s Dr Peter Dahlhaus about the Visualising Victoria’s Groundwater (VVG) project. The story summarised the evolution of the VVG project and examined how Victorian groundwater data is now accessible to the general public via the VVG web portal. Presenter of the radio program Libby Price described the site as a ‘one stop shop of groundwater information’ with ground water data now accessible ‘via a couple of clicks on your computer’.
Since the interview was aired, there has been a significant increase in the number of visitors to the VVG website signifying the popularity of the story with listeners of the Country Hour program. Indeed, in the hour following the radio program a record number of visits to the website were recorded representing a tenfold increase in in average visitor numbers to the website in an hour! The high volume of visitors to the VVG portal coupled with the intensive data retrieval capabilities of the portal placed additional strain on the server. For a short time after the program aired, some visitors to the portal experienced temporary difficulties accessing data during that time. This issue was promptly rectified and the portal was fully functioning within the hour.
The interest in the VVG website since this story has been aired has been extremely encouraging, with Dr Dahlhaus commenting: “It was great to see such significant interest in groundwater and we were delighted to receive emails from people telling us how pleased they were to discover the site and how potentially useful the site will be for them”.
The VVG website is available for public access and can be accessed at: www.vvv.org.au. Feedback about the website is welcomed.
The news article and replay can be found here. To listen to the full Country Hour radio for that day, that includes the VVG story as well as other stories related to water click here.
For further information about this project, contact FedUni’s Dr Peter Dahlhaus. E: p.dahlhaus@federation.edu.au