He is the founding director of the department's Spatial Interface Research Lab, which uses a range of tools to enable citizen and expert audiences to explore complex geographical problems in areas such as tsunami hazard, risk communication and avalanche education. International cooperation between the Canadian research network GEOmatics for Informed Decisions, and the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information in New Zealand/Australia, brought Dr Hedley to New Zealand to present his research at the Better Groundwater Management Workshop at Lincoln University, and at the University of Canterbury.