NSW NPWS - LoRaWAN People Counting at Jindabyne

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service manages millions of visitors across hundreds of parks. At the Jindabyne Head Office - the primary visitor centre for the Kosciuszko region - staff had no reliable data on visitor foot traffic to inform staffing, programming, or resource allocation. Manual counting methods were inconsistent and time-consuming, and any new system had to operate reliably in a government environment with minimal IT infrastructure overhead and no cabling works.

• ✓Selected LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) for its long range, low power consumption, low hardware cost, and AES-128 encrypted transmission - allowing sensors to be installed without cabling or changes to the existing IT network
• ✓Deployed people counter sensors at the key entry and exit points of the visitor centre, using passive infrared and beam-break technology to detect and count individuals through monitored doorways
• ✓Conducted gateway placement testing to ensure reliable signal transmission given thick walls and metal infrastructure
• ✓Built a custom web application for NPWS staff providing live occupancy dashboards, hourly/daily/weekly visitor charts, trend analysis for peak periods and seasonal patterns, and exportable reports
• ✓Ran a calibration phase to account for staff movements and overlapping detection zones

• →Real-time visitor counts available to NPWS staff for the first time, replacing inconsistent manual estimates with evidence-based data
• →Peak visitor periods identified with precision - including specific public-holiday spikes that had previously been under-accounted for in operational planning
• →Data revealed visitor dwell times longer than expected, validating existing programming and informing future visitor-centre layout investment
• →System runs with minimal ongoing maintenance after install and calibration - a meaningful advantage in a resource-constrained government environment
• →Architecture proven scalable: a single LoRaWAN gateway can support many additional sensors across other NPWS centres at low incremental cost