Alex Chapman – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au Environmental Technology Consultants Thu, 29 Feb 2024 03:47:38 +0000 en-AU hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 Our mobile apps – a recap https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/mobile-apps-recap/ Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:30:26 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=9051 Following on from our recent posts on the NAFI Fire Information and Slug Sleuth apps, we thought it would be good to highlight more of our work in mobile app development. Over the years we have developed quite a range of apps in the biodiversity, fire, parks and citizen science sectors. In the citizen science... Continue reading →

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Following on from our recent posts on the NAFI Fire Information and Slug Sleuth apps, we thought it would be good to highlight more of our work in mobile app development.

Over the years we have developed quite a range of apps in the biodiversity, fire, parks and citizen science sectors.

A range of mobile apps currently available in the App Stores

In the citizen science sector, a number of our apps have helped scientists engage with citizenry to monitor and report sightings of species of interest in order to broaden their research input. Our most long-running partnership is with the River Guardians team in WA’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, where the Dolphin Watch app has enabled the monitoring of the small population of Indo-pacific bottle-nosed dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in Perth’s Swan and Canning River estuary. Over nearly a decade we have put enormous effort into supporting this significant program, where up to 1000 trained local citizens have contributed images, observations and surveys to the project. The project has since been extended to other sites in WA, such as Broome and Mandurah.

Two more recent project to aid species conservation were the I Spy Koala app, developed in 2019 for the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) for the collection of koala observation and survey data to improve the flow of Koala observation data into NSW planning and decisions tools; and Slug Sleuth, , an app that aims to help scientists, locals and visitors to collect observation data for slugs and snails within Mount Kaputar National Park and adjacent Nandewar Ranges within NSW, but especially the threatened Mt Kaputar giant pink slug (Triboniophorus< aff. graeffei).

Significantly, both these apps were developed to submit data to the NPWS BioSys repository. BioSys is an open-source, standards-based data management system built specifically for biological data. The system has a flexible data schema model that allows users to create a schema specific to the structure of their data, and that can apply to just about any biological and ecological data.

The Urban Wildlife app was developed for the NESP Clean Air and Urban Landcapes Hub, based primarily at the University of Melbourne, and contained multiple projects in which to record sightings of bell frogs, beneficial insects, flying foxes, or possums and gliders, usually across all states and territories in Australia.

Another take on the utility of apps – if they can help observe and conserve biodiversity, can they also assist in managing its major threatening processes? Here’s a couple of examples that we’ve brought into production in the last couple of years.

A range of mobile apps currently available in the App Stores

The NAFI Fire Information app brings the most used fire information resource for land managers in northern Australia to a mobile device, providing a constant eye on local bushfire threats.

And, the Essential Service Volunteers app helps volunteers automatically track the duration, location and type of work they undertook, an ID card service to show they’re an approved member of a legitimate volunteer essential service, and access to community discounts for firies and others essential volunteers.

And for the Wildcare Helpline app we worked with the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) to develop an app that provides a service for the WA public who find sick or injured native wildlife and are seeking advice on where to find care for the animal.

We’ve also developed a number of apps along with DBCA and Trails WA to help the community enjoy the natural beauty of WA as well!. Camping Mate and Marine Parks WA are both DBCA apps aimed at ensuring the user maximises their experience of the Park facilities in WA, both on land ad water. And Trails WA provides detailed information – even when off-grid – to hikers hitting the extensive bike and walking tracks in WA.

And finally, it’s worth noting we also develop apps that have a very restricted purpose. The Mosquito Monitoring App is the first for the Atlas of Environmental Health (AEH). It was made specifically for the use of Environmental Health Officers within WA local governments. More recently, the AEH and the Mosquito Monitoring app have become useful in the Victorian health arena.

You can read more about our work on mobile apps over the last decade, or check out our current mobile apps in the Apple and Android app stores. (Other apps we’ve developed can be found on our client app stores.)

If you’re interested in how our mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to email me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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Slug Sleuth mobile app updates https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/slug-sleuth-mobile-app-updates/ Wed, 17 Feb 2021 02:34:34 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=9042 Following on from last week’s blog on the launch of the NAFI Fire Information app, we thought we’d mention some of the other work our mobile dev team have been producing. New updates have been made to Slug Sleuth, an app that aims to help scientists, locals and visitors to collect observation data for slugs... Continue reading →

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Following on from last week’s blog on the launch of the NAFI Fire Information app, we thought we’d mention some of the other work our mobile dev team have been producing.

New updates have been made to Slug Sleuth, an app that aims to help scientists, locals and visitors to collect observation data for slugs and snails within Mount Kaputar National Park and adjacent Nandewar Ranges within NSW. This recent release includes a refreshed user interface and an added feature to use pictures already stored on phone.

Screenshots from the Slug Sleuth app

Screenshots from the Slug Sleuth app

The app is available for both Apple and Android devices, and you can see a range of our current mobile apps in the Apple and Android app stores. Other apps we’ve developed can be found on our client app stores.

If you’re interested in how our mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to email me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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The data science of plant trait data https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/data-science-plant-trait-data/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 01:01:58 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8842 Data Science is a large and growing multidisciplinary field that employs scientific method, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data. It aims to unify data analysis, machine learning and related methods to understand the complexity of the world through large, often aggregated datasets.  Together with Data Analytics –... Continue reading →

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Data Science is a large and growing multidisciplinary field that employs scientific method, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data. It aims to unify data analysis, machine learning and related methods to understand the complexity of the world through large, often aggregated datasets.  Together with Data Analytics – the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data – they are especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information.  We’ve done a lot of work in both Data Science and Data Analytics at Gaia Resources over the years.

A Data Science wordcloud

What prompted me to focus on Data Science and Analytics in this week’s blog is the imminent publication of a paper I contributed to – ‘AusTraits – a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora’ (Falster D et al., 2021 – in press).  As the paper says:

“AusTraits synthesises data on 375 traits across 29230 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxa descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of performance (e.g. photosynthetic gas exchange, water-use efficiency) to morphological parameters (e.g. leaf area, seed mass, plant height) which link to aspects of ecological variation. AusTraits contains curated and harmonised individual-, species- and genus-level observations coupled to, where available, contextual information on-site properties. This data descriptor provides information on version 2.1.0 of AusTraits which contains data for 937243 trait-by-taxa combinations. We envision AusTraits as an ongoing collaborative initiative for easily archiving and sharing trait data to increase our collective understanding of the Australian flora.”

I and other colleagues from the Western Australian Herbarium were invited to contribute our data from the Descriptive Catalogue initiative, which contributed a small number of observed traits for c. 12,000 WA plant taxa. To my mind, one key strategy for data science is that major datasets are developed and maintained in a manner that can contribute to even larger integrative projects such as AusTraits, for further data analysis, again as we outline in the paper:

“AusTraits version 2.1.0 was assembled from 351 distinct sources, including published papers, field campaigns, botanical collections, and taxonomic treatments. Initially, we identified a list of candidate traits of interest, then identified primary sources containing measurements for these traits. As the compilation grew, we expanded the list of traits considered to include any measurable quantity that had been quantified for a moderate number of taxa (n > 20). To harmonise each source into the common a format AusTraits applied a reproducible and transparent workflow – a custom workflow to clean and standardise taxonomic names using the latest and most comprehensive taxonomic resources for the Australian flora: the Australian Plant Census (APC) and the Australian Plant Names Index (APNI).”

The AusTraits project is hosted by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) formed in July 2018. The ARDC is “a transformational initiative that aims to enable the Australian research community and provide industry access to nationally significant, leading-edge data-intensive eInfrastructure, platforms, skills and collections of high-quality data”.  This hosting contributes towards the maintenance aspect I mentioned above.

Full details on those processes will be available in the forthcoming publication, a link to which I’ll add when it becomes available.  Meanwhile, if you’d like to know more about this project, or about what we can offer in the Data Science and Analytics areas, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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TDWG 2020 Conference – avenues into integration https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/tdwg-2020-conference-avenues-integration/ Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:40:27 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8666 The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) annual conference was, like so many others, an online-only experience. With an audience of uber-nerds who inhabit the fine niche of taxonomy, systematics and biodiversity informatics – this posed no issue! There was a fine range of symposia and discussion sessions to choose from. These annual conferences serve two purposes:... Continue reading →

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The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) annual conference was, like so many others, an online-only experience. With an audience of uber-nerds who inhabit the fine niche of taxonomy, systematics and biodiversity informatics – this posed no issue!

There was a fine range of symposia and discussion sessions to choose from. These annual conferences serve two purposes:

  • to provide a forum for developing, refining, and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and
  • to provide a showcase for biodiversity informatics – much of which relies on the standards created by TDWG and other organizations.

Data standards that describe and support the exchange of biodiversity information are critical scientific infrastructure. They enable data to be integrated in support of research, decision-making and conservation planning. Ultimately, standards extend the usability of data across taxa, scientific disciplines, and administrative boundaries.

Gaia Resources now has a long history of actively participating in TDWG. Having attended my first conference in Reading, UK in 1998, I became the Oceania representative from 2002-2008, and in the year I took my leave from that position Gaia Resources played a major role in helping host the conference in Fremantle, WA.

This year a small team here prepared an interesting case study for presentation in the conference session entitled “Avenues into integration: communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient”, organised by researchers from Arizona State University. Serge, Kehan, Jason and I worked on exploring ways of validating taxonomic names data embedded within environmental impact assessments and survey reports. This was spurred by two initiatives:

The result was a small prototype we called ‘Species Informer’.

We created a procedure for uploading PDF documents, analysing taxonomic names, and then interrogating the Atlas of Living Australia for ancillary data for those names, such as local conservation status, in order to provide an automated summary of taxon names issues within each document for further analysis. We also ran a small test on image-only data using AWS Textract, to extract text from documents scanned as images to use as well.

Species-Informer-Architecture

Preliminary findings, from a small sample, included:

  • gnfinder speeds the process of finding taxon names uttered in a document
  • of course, it finds all taxon name mentions, not just the relevant ones for the survey
  • we didn’t explore the gnfinder options for sensitivity, data source or context searching
  • Species Informer produces a CSV report in c. 1 minute, as opposed to perhaps 8 hours for manual verification
  • at a c. 90% success rate for finding taxon names in a report, environment officers still need to check the whole document
  • not currently included in the Global Names Index are ‘phrase name taxa’ – c. 7% (1,143 of the 15,558) of the native vascular plant taxa in WA, and c. 15% (558 of the 3,782) of conservation taxa.

Some primary conclusions from this study included that ‘data governance’ is required at all parts of the process:

  • preparing the source report to ensure all taxa are resolved
  • the taxon names available to the Global Names Index could be expanded to include authenticated unpublished (phrase) names
  • the regular maintenance of name currency, conservation status and child taxon information is necessary
    conservation status needs to be better maintained at regional, national, global levels.

The video of is now available so you can hear the presentation and see the detailed results of our study. In fact, I would commend all presentations for viewing as many innovative methods for communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient were presented.

If you’d like to know more about this project, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Twenty Years of Descriptive Data https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/twenty-years-descriptive-data/ Thu, 15 Oct 2020 03:12:15 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8609 As part of his ongoing series of retrospectives on the development of significant biodiversity data sets in Western Australia, Alex looks at last week’s 20th anniversary of the publication of The Western Australian Flora – a Descriptive Catalogue. Funded by the Gordon Reid Foundation for Conservation (Lotterywest) and published jointly by The Wildflower Society of... Continue reading →

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As part of his ongoing series of retrospectives on the development of significant biodiversity data sets in Western Australia, Alex looks at last week’s 20th anniversary of the publication of The Western Australian Flora – a Descriptive Catalogue.

Cover of the Western Australian Flora - a Descriptive Catalogue Funded by the Gordon Reid Foundation for Conservation (Lotterywest) and published jointly by The Wildflower Society of Western Australia (Inc.), Western Australian Herbarium (DBCA) and Kings Park and Botanic Garden, this book took seven years to complete.

Effectively a third edition of John Beard’s ‘Descriptive Catalogue’, this project aimed to score a standardised set of descriptive data for every vascular plant species then known to occur in the State – some 11,922 taxa in all.

By adopting TDWG’s Description Language for Taxonomy (DELTA) standard the project was able to flexibly produce both the printed content for the book and a simple interactive identification method within FloraBase.

It is worth noting that WA and Queensland, due to their mega-diversity and very active species discovery, have yet to produce complete State Floras, and while not a Flora in the strict sense, this work was the first time a full conspectus and identification tool for the WA’s vascular flora had been achieved.

Many hands worked on realising this work. Greg Keighery for nurturing the project after Dr Beard, the members of the Steering Committee – Dr Neville Marchant (Director, WA Herbarium), Dr Steve Hopper and Roger Fryer (Kings Park) and successive presidents of the Wildflower Society — Marion Blackwell, Tom Alford, John Robertson, Anne Holmes and Brian Moyle.

Tom Alford was invaluable throughout in the role of project chairperson, championing the data-based approach to information gathering, and tirelessly seeking funds to complete the project. Three wonderful people conscientiously gathered and codified the data from the Herbarium’s Census and Specimen datasets — Grazyna Paczkowska, Helen Coleman and Amanda Spooner, the latter who saw the book through publication and maintained the descriptive dataset for a further 8 years. And I cannot go without mentioning colleagues Nicholas Lander, Terry Macfarlane, Ben Richardson, Mike Choo and the sorely missed Paul Gioia, who all supported this innovative project.

The coded data from the publication was the last major piece of the FloraBase project to fit in place, integrating with the Names and Specimen data, images and maps and providing the first simple Statewide interactive key to the Western Australian flora. Twenty years later the available data is still working away, but there are now twelve years of data updates to be made. Time to get this project back on the rails with a further funding round!

You can read much more about this project in the book’s Introduction, available here: https://florabase.dpaw.wa.gov.au/publications/descat/.

As always, if you’d like to know more about this area, then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Evidence-based planning for resilient World Heritage Areas https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/planning-for-resilient-whas/ Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:11 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8564 Yesterday I attended an online event discussing planning for resilient World Heritage Areas, focussing on case studies in the Gondwanan rainforests of NE NSW and SE Queensland. The event was part of the Climate Change, Fire, and Biodiversity webinar series, co-hosted by the NESP Threatened Species Recovery and Earth Systems and Climate Change Hubs. Twenty... Continue reading →

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Yesterday I attended an online event discussing planning for resilient World Heritage Areas, focussing on case studies in the Gondwanan rainforests of NE NSW and SE Queensland. The event was part of the Climate Change, Fire, and Biodiversity webinar series, co-hosted by the NESP Threatened Species Recovery and Earth Systems and Climate Change Hubs.

Twenty World Heritage Areas are recognised in Australia by UNESCO for their unique cultural, geographical, and biological diversity. While these areas support outstanding universal values, they are under risk from disease, invasive species, and declining ecosystem processes. The speakers and panellists, drawn from the scientific community and on-the-ground conservation practitioners, discussed the benefits and challenges of integrating climate change and biodiversity knowledge in developing adaptive management plans to build more resilience in both species and ecosystems. They also clearly identified that existing ecological pressures are being exacerbated by a rapidly changing climate.

There were two featured speakers and five panellists discussing these pressing conservation issues – you can read more about each of them here.

Melinda Laidlaw, a Senior Ecologist with the Queensland Herbarium, gave a fascinating talk on a number of the decision tools employed for modelling past, current and future species habitats and investigating the impacts of climate change on the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area.

Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat across Queensland pre-clearing

Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat across Queensland pre-clearing

Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat remaining as remnant vegetation in 2015.

Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat remaining as remnant vegetation in 2015

Source: State of the Environment – Queensland Department of Environment and Science.


 
Dave Newell, a Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University, spoke passionately about his work on understanding the ecology of endangered amphibians, most of which are narrow range endemics susceptible to climate change and disease impacts. Dave and his students’ work in the World Heritage rainforests of northern NSW over several decades has improved conservation outcomes for some of Australia’s most unique frogs.

Dave Newell - illustrating the process for modelling rainforest frog distributions

Dave Newell – illustrating in more detail the process for modelling potential rainforest frog distributions

In response to audience questions, the panellists also discussed other threatening processes like extreme bushfire events and invasive diseases such as Myrtle Rust, the importance of new research into understanding the importance of ‘cloud water’ as a key survival strategy for some montane species, and the necessity of on-the-ground community coordination of conservation efforts.

I will add a link to the full webinar recording when it becomes available, or you will find it here in coming days.

The next webinar in this series is ‘Carbon sequestration & biodiversity: valuing & managing carbon-rich systems‘, scheduled for Tue, 13 October 2020 – I commend this series to you.

Species habitat modelling is an area I’ve long been interested in (I was a fairly early user of BIOCLIM in my work at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, too many years ago) and more recently wrote on the utility of using the Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL).

Gaia Resources has worked with another NESP Hub – Clean Air Urban Landscapes – in recent years to build their Urban Wildlife mobile app. If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources could work with you in this area, then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Supporting Emergency Services https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/supporting-emergency-services/ Wed, 09 Sep 2020 02:07:46 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8496 Regular readers of our posts will already know of Gaia Resources involvement in the development of the Essential Services Volunteers app previously this year. If not, there’s a case study that we’ve been working on with our partners in this, Amazon Web Services (which you can also see by clicking on the image below). An... Continue reading →

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Regular readers of our posts will already know of Gaia Resources involvement in the development of the Essential Services Volunteers app previously this year. If not, there’s a case study that we’ve been working on with our partners in this, Amazon Web Services (which you can also see by clicking on the image below).

AWS Case Study

AWS Case Study

AWS Summary Slide

AWS Summary Slide

An extract from the case study is below:

Late last year, we answered a call from the Association of Volunteer Bushfire Brigades of Western Australia, who were seeking a partner to help develop a proof of concept mobile app and web site that would support the volunteers fighting bushfires around WA. Then, in early 2020, funding became available to develop a much more fully-featured product, resulting in the Essential Service Volunteers (ESV) app, which was launched back in April.

Bushfire Volunteers WA worked closely with us to create a smartphone app that helps emergency services volunteers register, track activities, and access local merchant offers. The app:

  • empowers volunteers to track activities for medical and employment reimbursement
  • enables offline use with the ability to sync data when users go online again, and
  • created an app with utility for all public emergency services

Our CEO, Piers Higgs, was quoted as saying:

Our hope is that this app will make the lives of bushfire volunteers easier and be adopted broadly throughout various public service agencies across Australia. Using the power of the AWS Cloud enables us to do so with security, scalability, and cost-efficiency that would not be possible any other way.

Being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, our team chose to build the app on the AWS Cloud. Using AWS means Bushfire Volunteers WA doesn’t have to manage infrastructure or pay for more capacity than it needs, and because bushfires are largely seasonal, it’s a solution that can scale up as volunteer brigades need to use it, and then scale back down again when the needs are less urgent.

Our implementation relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide image and object storage, and uses Amazon CloudFront to speed content delivery. In addition, AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles web app deployment, including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and app health monitoring, further reducing management overhead for both Gaia Resources and the Association. The app also takes advantage of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for foundational compute services and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL for fully managed database service.

Screenshots from the ESV app

You can read more about our AWS strategy in recent blogs here and here and if you’d like to know more then please drop angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au a line, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Archives and RetroMaps https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/archives-and-retromaps/ Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:30:03 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8435 I attended a recent presentation organised by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) at their Perth offices in Northbridge, entitled ‘Perth lost and found: built heritage in Western Australian collections‘. The event featured speakers from the NAA, the City of Perth, the State Library of Western Australia (SLWA) and the State Record Office (SROWA). Each... Continue reading →

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I attended a recent presentation organised by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) at their Perth offices in Northbridge, entitled ‘Perth lost and found: built heritage in Western Australian collections‘.

The event featured speakers from the NAA, the City of Perth, the State Library of Western Australia (SLWA) and the State Record Office (SROWA).

Each of the speakers illustrated their talk with images from their collections.

  • Taren Laurie (NAA) showed many pics of Perth built infrastructure and provided a quick intro to their RecordSearch tool.
  • Kate Parker and Hannah Eames (City of Perth) focused on Perth Town Hall art, their spatial platform, and drew attention to the City’s podcast ‘Untold Stories of Perth‘.
  • John Hughes (SLWA) gave an overview of the pictures and films of Leslie le Souef in their collection.
  • Damien Hassan (SROWA) showed some of the architectural plans for Perth townsite (including underground toilets and tunnels of St Georges Terrace!) and attempted a quick demo of RetroMaps.
Damian Hassan from State Records Office

Damian Hassan from State Records Office illustrates RetroMap coverage around Perth

In question-time the speakers also referenced some archive aggregating services such as Collections WA and Culture WA.

Speaking of RetroMaps, this great project that we worked on with the SROWA last year, has been receiving some deserved attention recently. Damain Hassan, Senior Archivist at SROWA was interviewed for a news article and podcast broadcast last week on ABC Perth:

There has been great interest in this new site, and we look forward to assisting the SROWA mine and present their collections online in future projects. If you’d like to know more about Gaia Resources work in archives and collections then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Biodiversity Information Standards 2020 Virtual Conference https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/tdwg-2020-virtual-conference/ Wed, 12 Aug 2020 06:08:02 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8411 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is a not-for-profit, scientific and educational association formed to establish international collaboration among the creators, managers and users of biodiversity information. It acts to promote the wider and more effective dissemination and sharing of knowledge about the world’s heritage of biological organisms. Data standards that describe and support the exchange of... Continue reading →

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Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is a not-for-profit, scientific and educational association formed to establish international collaboration among the creators, managers and users of biodiversity information. It acts to promote the wider and more effective dissemination and sharing of knowledge about the world’s heritage of biological organisms.

Data standards that describe and support the exchange of biodiversity information are critical to scientific infrastructure. They enable data to be integrated in support of research, as well as decision-making and conservation planning. Ultimately, standards extend the usability of data across taxa, scientific disciplines, and administrative boundaries.

Current TDWG data standards

Current and previous TDWG data standards

The annual Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conferences serve two purposes:

  • to provide a forum for developing, refining, and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and
  • to provide a showcase for biodiversity informatics – much of which relies on the standards created by TDWG and other organisations.

Gaia Resources has been involved with this international standards body for some time, either utilising their data standards in various projects, developing modules for TDWG itself, or actively participating in their standards development.

TDWG 2020 logo
While with the Western Australian Herbarium, I and other scientists worked on a number of TDWG standards (notably HISPID, ABCD, SDD and DELTA) and was the Oceania representative of TDWG for 6 years, culminating in hosting the 2008 annual conference in Fremantle, part-sponsored by Gaia Resources and Piers a valuable organising committee member.

This year’s virtual conference will be scheduled the week of October 19-23 and some of our team will be participating in various sessions. I would commend attending this conference if you’re keen to keep up with the latest work of this dedicated global community.

If you’d like to know more about Gaia Resources involvement and use of biodiversity information standards then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Latest on the Essential Service Volunteers App https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/latest-essential-service-volunteers-app/ Fri, 07 Aug 2020 03:46:42 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8381 You may have read about Gaia Resources involvement in the development of the Essential Services Volunteers app previously this year. There have been significant recent developments we wanted to highlight. Firstly, Bushfire Volunteers WA Executive Officer Darren Brown talked about the new app supporting bushfire volunteers in a great interview with Triple R’s Byte Into... Continue reading →

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Screenshots from the ESV app

Screenshots from the ESV app

You may have read about Gaia Resources involvement in the development of the Essential Services Volunteers app previously this year. There have been significant recent developments we wanted to highlight.

Firstly, Bushfire Volunteers WA Executive Officer Darren Brown talked about the new app supporting bushfire volunteers in a great interview with Triple R’s Byte Into IT – a weekly broadcast on computer news, tech talk and opinionated chat with regular guests, presented by Vanessa Toholka.

You can listen to the 15-minute segment with Darren discussing the ESV app, its genesis and value here. It’s a great insight into the necessity for better documentation of volunteers’ efforts on the job, and the ways the community can validly contribute to support their work.


The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, recently recognised the significant contribution of Bushfire Volunteers WA’s work in this letter:

PM's letter to Bushfire Volunteers WA

PM’s letter to Bushfire Volunteers WA

Gaia Resources is proud to have partnered with Bushfire Volunteers WA to develop and support this app. We truly hope the use of this app expands to assist even more essential service volunteers across Australia to document and validate their valuable time in service of the Australian community.

If you’re interested in how volunteer mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to comment below, or contact angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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Drones for Wildlife https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/drones-wildlife/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:30:44 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8364 Over the last couple of years, Gaia Resources developed a desktop app for the team at Wildlife Drones to act as a field mapping application for the real-time display of (radio frequency) tagged animal locations monitored by drone. The desktop app delivered imagery and mapping layers available for offline and online use and included the... Continue reading →

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Over the last couple of years, Gaia Resources developed a desktop app for the team at Wildlife Drones to act as a field mapping application for the real-time display of (radio frequency) tagged animal locations monitored by drone. The desktop app delivered imagery and mapping layers available for offline and online use and included the ability to synchronise collected data to a central database when back within mobile range.

More recent work focused on improvements in real-time data display of the drone position and radio tags, offline base-map useability and back-end data processing. Wildlife Drones have presented their integrated solution to conferences around Australia, and have a growing client base where our desktop app is a critical component contributing to important wildlife conservation efforts and research.

Deb demonstrating the Wildlife Drones method

Debbie Saunders demonstrating the Wildlife Drones method

Dr Debbie Saunders, CEO of Wildlife Drones, gave us a great wrap:

“Gaia Resources did a wonderful job turning all our user interface ideas into reality.  Within a relatively short period of time we went from having a general idea of what we wanted to having a very impressive, incredibly user friendly and intuitive user interface.  This has dramatically increased our ability to demonstrate our technology to anyone who is interested.  All the feedback from customers, investors and the broader community has been overwhelming positive and we are also now thoroughly enjoying using our cutting edge technology with much greater ease.”

Wildlife Drones are currently working on a project looking at the differences in behaviour and movement of Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in burnt and non-burnt environments. In this recent article, Debbie says:

“Usually when you are tagging wild animals there are always some that disappear, there are always some that take off. You end up spending all your time and effort looking for the missing animals. When you are on the ground with a handheld receiver, you’re tracking one animal at the time, you’re taking hours. With the drone we can track [the signals of] 40 animals at the same time, we could see all of the koalas all the time.”

In the aftermath of last summers devastating bushfires there is a lot of work going on in New South Wales and Victoria to monitor remaining populations of Koala and drones are playing a crucial and time-saving role in this research.

Over much the same timeframe, Gaia Resources has been working with the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) to develop another approach to monitoring Koala populations, via the I Spy Koala citizen science app. There is clearly a role for both approaches to help save our dwindling Koala populations, and perhaps there may be some synergy between them.

More information about this project can be found in our blogs and project page. And you can hear more about Wildlife Drones direct from Debbie in this upcoming Environmental Institute webinar.

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this post, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Twenty years of WA floristic data https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/twenty-years-floristic-data/ Wed, 03 Jun 2020 07:41:23 +0000 https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/?p=8217 I’ve been with Gaia Resources for six years now (!), and grateful to have found a home where my specialist knowledge of taxonomy, systematics and biodiversity informatics adds value to the enterprise. I remain a research associate at the Western Australian Herbarium, both in order to continue my research into WA’s heaths – the Ericaceae... Continue reading →

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I’ve been with Gaia Resources for six years now (!), and grateful to have found a home where my specialist knowledge of taxonomy, systematics and biodiversity informatics adds value to the enterprise.

I remain a research associate at the Western Australian Herbarium, both in order to continue my research into WA’s heaths – the Ericaceae – and to provide some institutional services.

One of these has been to collate and summarise significant changes in flora statistics from year to year, starting with the publication of the Descriptive Catalogue (Paczkowska and Chapman, 2000). This included a simple table of major floristic data, and a comparison with previous stats from the past century (updated here in Figure 1).

Milestones on documenting species discovery in Western Australia

Exactly the same data was also used in a major paper comparing species richness and endemism in Mediterranean biomes (Beard, Chapman and Gioia, 2000). All this was made possible by my work with the greatly missed Paul Gioia, with whom I built the first statewide census database for vascular and cryptogamic flora – WACENSUS – begun in 1990. Of course, there were previously printed publications by John Green (1981, 1985) and maintained in supplement subsequently by Nicholas Lander, that provided the initial source data. The WACENSUS database, however, enabled real-time documentation of plant names in play for the State, and an immutable Life Science Identifier (LSID) that could be referred to across information systems.

In that time, we have seen the flora statistics document a steady increase in the number of species, both published and ‘putative’ (i.e. manuscript and phrase-name taxa), grow steadily (Figure 2).

Increase in WA's vascular plant species over time

2020 marks a number of milestones for the State’s documentation of our precious and unique flora:

  • the 50th anniversary of the first edition of Nuytsia – WA’s systematic botany journal, that provides much of the published taxonomic work describing and classifying the States’ flora;
  • 30 years since ‘the Census’ became a functional database underpinning authoritative, accurate and an up-to-date source for plant names in current use (and their synonyms) in WA;
  • 20 years since ‘The Western Australian Flora – A Descriptive Catalogue’ was published, from which the descriptive query capacity of FloraBase was drawn;
  • 20 years since the last major analysis of the uniqueness of our State’s flora (especially with regards to other Mediterranean floras of the world);
  • 17 years since the last major revision of ‘FloraBase — the Western Australian Flora’ was released.

In the intervening years, Paul Gioia worked to manually integrate the Western Australian Museum’s faunal names into the Census as well, in order to maximise that knowledge in his major work – NatureMap (2007 onwards). As a result, WA has a standardised names dataset for much of the biota of the state.

It is very heartening to me to see the development of the next generation of WA’s biodiversity information systems through the work of the newly-funded Biodiversity Information Office – see last week’s post.

Yesterday, I received the 2019-20 flora statistics data, from which I will extract the significant highlights and changes for the past year. This complex report was only automated (after years of testing for veracity against my manually-calculated version) in 2019. Again, this could not have been achieved without the dedicated work of Paul Gioia, Ben Richardson and the invaluable curatorial team at the WA Herbarium. These results will be published in FloraBase in coming weeks.

UPDATE: The 2020 flora statistics are now available.

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this post, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on TwitterLinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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