Stantec

This award recognises a hi-tech advancement or concept that has helped a company improve its performance or delivery of a specific challenging element of a project, between January 2022 and January 2023. This category is not aimed at projects that have achieved overall excellence – such projects should be entered into one of the six project categories. The entrant may have achieved technical excellence through producing a new approach to analysis or design, advanced techniques or procedures during design or delivery and/or working with its customers to improve delivery of a specific part of a project through technical refinement. An entry should be for a single technical advance or development applied to a specific part of a project. Developments applied to a number of projects may be better placed in the Digital Innovation or Equipment Innovation categories. The geotechnical work on the project presented must be completed at the time of the submission.

Karst Susceptibility Hazard Map of South Oxfordshire

The increasing pressure on counties, such as South Oxfordshire, to develop land for residential, industrial and commercial purposes, as well as prioritizing the maintenance of existing assets, has emphasised the requirement to gain an early understanding of the spatial distribution of karstic features and the geotechnical and financial constraints they present. Such requirements were foreseen by Dr Clive Edmonds in the 1980s when he developed a unique, nationwide collection of natural cavities, now known as the Cavities Database. Stantec has maintained a dedicated team to research, scrutinise and innovate this integral dataset to develop a GIS-based algorithm that calculates the potential for natural cavities to be present in areas underlain by Chalk. The product, Karst Susceptibility Hazard Map, has been implemented across South Oxfordshire to provide an interactive, visual representation of ground instability hotspots that can facilitate early, informed, cost-effective decisions on investment, development and maintenance.