NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service · Royal National Park
Royal National Park carries more than four million visits a year on systems that were never built for it. ParkPass pulls bookings, passes, crowding and field reporting into one place that visitors and rangers both use.
Database connected — MySQL 8.4.10-10
Royal National Park
Bonnie Vale Campground · Site 14
PP 2026 RNP 004821
The problem
The park is not short of staff who care or visitors who do the right thing. It is short of one place where any of this is written down. We spent the first two weeks of this project working out what actually breaks, rather than what looks broken from the outside. These six came up again and again.
Visitors, gate staff
Someone camping at Bonnie Vale books the site in one system and buys the vehicle entry pass in another. They come away with two emails, two reference numbers, and nothing that proves the pair belong together. At the gate a ranger checks a printed list, because there is nothing better to check against.
Visitors, rangers, the bushland itself
Garie and Wattamolla fill by mid morning on a summer weekend. There is no live count of what is already inside, so the park cannot warn anyone and people drive an hour to be turned around at the boom gate. Those cars then park along the road verge, and the verge is where most of the vegetation damage actually happens.
Rangers, maintenance crew, visitor safety
A washed out section of the Coast Track goes into a ranger notebook, gets typed up at the end of the shift, and can sit in an inbox for a week. Visitors almost always see the damage first, and they have nowhere to report it, so the park throws away its earliest warning.
NPWS conservation staff
Visitors photograph a swamp wallaby, a lyrebird, or a feral deer. That last one matters most. Pest sightings and threatened species records are exactly what conservation planning runs on, and at the moment they go to Instagram rather than to anyone who could act on them.
Rangers, area supervisors
Patrol rosters, maintenance jobs, track closures and incident reports each live in their own file, owned by a different person. Nobody can see a whole week on one screen. Two rangers get sent to the same job, and a track that closed on Friday is still showing as open on Sunday.
NPWS management, the public
Visitor load by precinct, carrying capacity, incident trends over a season. The numbers exist, in fragments, in systems that do not talk to each other. That makes it hard to report against conservation targets and harder still to argue for resting an area under pressure.
None of these is a single large failure. They are six small ones that each cost a few hours a week and a little bit of bushland. Our business case puts the value of fixing them at roughly $327,000 a year in recovered staff time, captured revenue and avoidable repair work, against a first year build of about $214,000. That is a payback of around ten months.
Who uses it
Every role below is implemented in the prototype with its own screens and its own permissions. Sign in as any of them from the prototype page: there is one demo account per role.
Anyone driving down for the day or the weekend
6 use cases
On the ground, usually without reception
6 use cases
Trades and works crew
4 use cases
Species and pest management
5 use cases
Commercial groups working in the park
4 use cases
NPWS area office
6 use cases
The solution
The prototype covers the visitor, ranger, maintenance, conservation, operator and administrator paths end to end.
Pick your dates, see which sites are actually free, pay once, and carry the pass on your phone.
A live crowding indicator for each precinct, so visitors can choose a quieter time to arrive.
Photograph a washed out track, drop a pin, and it reaches the ranger work queue the same minute.
Sightings logged with a location and a date, feeding straight into NPWS conservation records.
Patrols, jobs and closures for the whole week on one screen instead of four spreadsheets.
Broken gate, blocked amenities, damaged signage. Logged, assigned, and tracked to close out.
Visitor load measured against carrying capacity, so the park can rest the areas under strain.
Licensed operators lodge group bookings and permits themselves, with no ranger in the loop.
The park
Royal National Park, on the southern edge of Sydney. The second oldest national park in the world.
assets/park-1.jpgassets/park-2.jpgassets/park-3.jpgThe build
Plain LAMP, chosen because we have to hand it over and somebody else has to keep it running after we graduate.
A booking travels left to right: the browser posts the form, PHP validates it and re-checks availability, then one transaction writes the booking and its pass together and an audit row records who did it. If any part fails the whole thing rolls back, so there is never a booking without a pass.
The plan
Scrum, two week sprints, with a review and a retrospective at the end of each. The team coordinates daily in a WhatsApp group and meets weekly in class.
Sprint 1 · Weeks 3 and 4
Repository, hosting, database connection proven, page frame and sign in.
Sprint 2 · Weeks 5 and 6
Entity relationship diagram, all tables created, authentication, sessions and role checks.
Sprint 3 · Weeks 7 and 8
Availability search, the four step booking flow, pass generation, cancellation.
Sprint 4 · Weeks 9 and 10
Damage reporting, wildlife sightings, ranger work queue, maintenance jobs, closures.
Sprint 5 · Weeks 11 and 12
Capacity monitoring, sustainability dashboard, operator portal, accessibility and security pass.
Final · Week 12
Full test pass, WCAG 2.2 AA check, security review against the Essential Eight, documentation.
The team
ICT313 IT Engaged Project · Wentworth Institute of Higher Education
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