NPWS Research Project Data Standards and Project Delivery
The following information is relevant to individuals or organisations about to undertake a research project on behalf of NPWS. When you start a NPWS research project you will be supplied with a Project Delivery Pack by NPWS or referred to this web page where the latest revision of the Pack is available for download. This project pack contains guidelines, project requirements, templates and checklists to help you to prepare for project delivery from the start of the project.
NPWS is undertaking a rationalisation and streamlining of all research project resources held by the organisation. As part of this initiative a review of the naming of project resource files and directory structures has been undertaken, leading to a proposed standardization of structures and naming conventions. As a result guidelines have been drawn up for use in delivery of future project resources to NPWS. The term resource as used here generally relates to the digital files or groups of files that form the products of the project.
In tandem with the project resource organization NPWS have drawn up a set of data standard guidelines for the delivery of data associated with NPWS research projects. These guidelines are provided to ensure consistency and compatibility with other datasets within NPWS.
The downloadable zip archive (18.8 MB), NPWS Project Delivery Pack, contains a project directory tree and a templates folder populated with the most current versions of forms, documentation and templates. The current release of the Project Delivery Pack is version 9.1 (updated April 2026).
This archive includes document: NPWS Data Standards and Project Delivery Guidelines which describes content of the archive, steps of NPWS project process, standards expected from resources, and explains how to prepare resources for delivery to NPWS. Latest version 2.0 (updated April 2026) of this document can be downloaded directly from HERE.
You can also download a sample of two project directory trees populated with real project data to further inform your preparation of data deliveries to NPWS. This can be downloaded from the zip archive Sample NPWS Project Delivery Directory Tree (11.2 MB).