The app is now live for both Android and iOS and we were fortunate enough to have the NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean launch the app over the past weekend in conjunction with the announcement of a new koala hospital in Port Stephens.

I Spy Koala splash screen

We will continue to support and promote open source and the collaboration opportunities it allows for BioSys and our other systems into the future.

You can download the app from here for iOS or Android if you would like to try it out (and have some nearby koalas!).

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

Andrew

The post I Spy Koala App is Live appeared first on Gaia Resources.

BioSys was initially created to solve the problem of not having a centralised place to capture, curate and manage biological and ecological field data, and this is a problem that many jurisdictions face – as well as many environmental companies, mining companies and other businesses.  This whole “where is the data being held” discussion is something Piers, Alex and I have been mulling over for a while now, and Alex is going to produce a few blog articles about it in the near future, drawing on his long experience working in the biodiversity informatics space.

The benefits of collaboration are really paying off for the OEH and DBCA.  Earlier this year, OEH significantly benefited by being able to implement DBCA’s BioSys rather than developing a very similar system from scratch.  Instead, they focused their funding on making BioSys mobile-ready; resulting in a Koala Watch app being developed and produced for their use in NSW.

The Koala Watch splash screen – stay tuned for more on this in 2019!

That investment is, in turn, now supporting DBCA to further develop the original Koala Watch app into a more generic data recording tool that dynamically reads data definitions from within BioSys to provide usable forms for data capture in the field. This functionality is something which we’ve been working on at Gaia for some time, across multiple products and services.

This is a real win-win for both the DBCA and OEH and our long-held strategy of supporting collaboration is now actually delivering on its promise.

While we’re waiting for the launch of the Koala Watch, we’re working on the DBCA mobile data capture app, aiming to have it out for their testing in January 2019.  That will be a really interesting phase, as there are multiple different mobile data collection apps in use within DBCA (as we discussed in an internal workshop earlier this year that has seen Piers doing his usual trick of writing up diagrams on every available whiteboard ever since, like below – even as recently as this morning as you can see from Piers’ new fashion accessory).

Just another impromptu whiteboard session

It’s really great being involved in a collaborative project like BioSys, where we can see the benefits of that collaboration coming through thick and fast.  It’s a big feather in the cap of the BioSys champions – Paul Gioia (DBCA), Ron Avery (OEH) and James Bibby (OEH) – that they have been able to get this to work.

This is the sort of vision and collaboration that we strive for in all of our projects and we’d like to do more of it.  If you’re interested in this sort of approach, contact me or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post Delivering on collaboration appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The 3.4 long term release is a real evolution from 3.0, which was a major upgrade for the QGIS platform.  Although we saw a lot of improvement by the 3.2 release over the 3.0 release, 3.4 is even more stable.  There are a long list of changes that are present in the new 3.4 release, a full listing of which is available on the QGIS Changelog web site.  We thought we’d hit some of the highlights, and the things you need to think about in the move from a 2.X version to the new 3.4 platform, assuming you’re moving with the Long Term Releases.

1. Plugins need checking!

If you have been using the previous 2.18 LTR and have any plugins developed in that framework, then you will need to do some rework and refresh of those plugins.  3.X is a very different platform to 2.X and the plugins are not compatible – this is something that may take organisations some time to get through.  There’s a whole ecosystem of developers out there though, all working on plugins – again, this is the benefit of open source software!

2. Topology checking ++

Remembering when we were running topology checking from the command line of packages like Arc/Info, any improvements to that are a big benefit.  The improvements to the topology checking – including checks while editing (for gaps, overlaps and missing vertices on neighbouring polygons) is a big step in the right direction.   Chris has a bit of wishful thinking that offering some choices for fixing these is something that he’d like to see, so we’ll see about talking to the development team about that in the future.

3. Dockable attribute tables

Yes, we get excited about pretty mundane things, but dockable attribute tables are certainly welcome.  Although this might not seem like much, when you have limited screen real estate, these sorts of things are very useful for productivity.

4. 3D features

The 3D feature support – although this still tends to be a niche use case – is certainly ramped up in 3.4, with the ability to add 3D map views to the map composer.  In typical understated style the changelog just states “This feature allows users to add their 3D map view to the print layout” but that is a pretty big benefit for those QGIS users that utilise 3D.

Those are probably the four main highlights to us, but there are a lot of other improvements that are quite specific – across a wide range of different areas, including expressions, map tools, user interface, symbology, digitising, data management, forms and widgets, map composer, processing, general, data providers, QGIS server, plugins, progammability and 3D features.

The big benefit here is again from the open source community.  A range of organisations across the globe helped to fund this release through the sponsorship approach, which is something we’ve always kept an eye on.  While we haven’t done direct sponsorship, our free QGIS training courses are certainly having an impact – bringing a lot more individuals and organisations onto the QGIS platform, and we’re looking at some potential development support in the future as well.

If you’re interested in our QGIS training, or would like to just show some support for our courses, let us know via training@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post What’s new in QGIS 3.4 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

BioSys is an open-source standards-based data management system built specifically for biological data, built around the premise of making it as easy as possible for users to store their 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 sorts of biological and ecological data.

Since the 2015 blog, we have continued to work on BioSys with DBCA and the system has had considerable enhancements and has now moved well beyond the pilot stage and is in production across a number of projects.  The project has been a model of collaboration all the way through, with staff from the DBCA (including Paul Gioia and others) heavily involved in the design and specifications for the system.

BioSys has evolved greatly since our first pilot

One of the things that most excited us about working on BioSys was that DBCA would be making the code open source and would actively be looking for collaboration with other agencies.  Earlier this year, thanks to the hard work of the DBCA team, we had the opportunity to work on a collaborative project with DBCA and the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) for a pilot BioSys project to support their Koala survey field work.

I Spy Koala splash screen

The goal for the pilot project was to provide an end-to-end workflow from data collection in the field to OEH’s existing BioNet data repository. This involved a number of changes to the BioSys server and web system, but most excitingly a new mobile data collection tool. For the pilot project the mobile tool will only support the koala collection data schema, but it is expected that in time the tool will support any BioSys schema without need for further development. The mobile field collection tool will also be open-sourced at the completion of the project, which will then put the entire BioSys tool kit in the public domain – a great outcome, especially for a project funded by government!

UPDATE – August 2019: We’ve now finished the production implementation for the I Spy Koala project, which has gone exceedingly well, and the apps and system are now available via NSW Koala Country.

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

Andrew

The post BioSys and National Collaboration appeared first on Gaia Resources.

BCCVL Species Modelling Workshop (Alex)

On July 19 Jake and I attended a workshop on ‘Innovative tools for mapping and modelling species distributions‘ at Curtin University.

Drs Sarah Richmond and Chantal Huijbers from the BCCVL at Griffith Uni presented a workshop for c. 20 participants. By extracting species occurrence data from the spatial portal of Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and importing it into the BCCVL we were able to:

1. understand the need for careful selection and ‘cleaning’ of the spatial data
2. submit the cleaned dataset to various ecological models, including developing predicted species distribution models (see Figure 1), and then
3. analyse these putative distribution models under various future climate change scenarios.

This was all done within the BCCVL’s online portal, shown below.

A predicted species distribution model in the BCCVL.

The BCCVL presents complex spatial data layers, modelling concepts and algorithms in a very usable web portal. It does not, of course, remove the need for users to understand the limitations of the available data or the applicability of models and algorithms.  A more advanced modelling environment – the EcoScience Research Data Cloud and Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory (EcoCloud) was also announced and will be available shortly.

We were very interested in some of the ways that data was presented, and the tools that the BCCVL were making openly available – they seem to be things that we could potentially use in our own work, or we can recommend to our clients.

Perth EcoScience Pathways Forum (Andrew)

The following day I attended another BCCVL led event: the ‘Perth EcoScience Pathways Forum’ at the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. This event aimed to provide an opportunity to learn more about existing digital infrastructure,  training and skills development programs for environmental science, and it also showcases research and exemplar users of digital technologies.  A big part of this is that it also aims to ignite discussions around common issues and practices.

The earlier part of the day focused on some of the interesting research happening in this space, it was great to see our BioSys and Climatewatch projects getting a mention at various points. A few of the highlights for me from the morning session were:

• Paul Gioia talking about BioSys and the recent work we have done on a new mobile tool (more to come on that in a future project summary),
• A demo of the soon to be released EcoCloud system, and
• Dr Nicki Mitchell from UWA discussing how they have been using Climatewatch as a data collection and analysis tool for their first year biology students
  

In the afternoon the focus shifted from research to discussing issues and challenges attendees were having in their day to day work. There were a number of interesting issues discussed but the one that really peaked my interest was related to fire data. A number of people in my group were frustrated that they weren’t able to see all relevant fire scar data in one place, but also that they weren’t confident in the fire scar boundaries –  they found it difficult and time consuming to ground truth them using aerial imagery.  I’m always keen to hear about problems like these because solving problems is exactly what we do here at Gaia Resources.

Once I got back from the forum I asked Jake if he could take a look at the fire scar data and see if he could put something together as a proof of concept for how this task could be completed more efficiently.

Fire Scar Data (Jake)

Andrew’s already set the scene for what he asked me to do – a way of looking at some relevant imagery, and fire scar data, to make it really easy for people to ground truth those areas.

I chose to implement this using a web-based leaflet map, and to show a side-by-side comparison of the data from NAFI (Northern Australian Fire Information) current fire scars (for 2018, at least) and overlay that with the most up-to-date Sentinel imagery. The area displayed on the map clearly shows recent fire scars and if you drag the middle toggle across you will be able to see evidence of this on the Sentinel satellite imagery.

NAFI fire scars are mapped using images from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument carried by NASA’s Terra satellite. These images have a resolution of 250m as you can probably examine if you zoom into the edges of a fire scar boundary, where they appear blocky and pixellated.

Using the NAFI and Sentinel web services makes it really easy to display relevant data quickly and without the hassle of downloading large datasets and pre-processing data, but the downsides to this workflow are lower resolution results and not being able to analyse the data in an in-depth way – something you’d do in a desktop spatial package, like QGIS (and I have to give a plug for our free online QGIS training course).

If you would like to know anymore about how we set up this sort of web map, data sourcing, or anything else, feel free to get in touch via our emails below, leave a comment, or start a conversation with us on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Alex, Andrew and Jake

The post BCCVL Workshops appeared first on Gaia Resources.

For those that aren’t familiar with FOSS4G it is a conference for the open source geospatial community that brings together developers, users and decision makers for workshops, presentations and discussions. FOSS4G events are held all over the world each year including an annual global event that is happening in August in Dar es Salaam. I have been lucky enough to go to the global conference twice, you can read more about my trip to the 2014 conference in Portland here.

Open source geospatial has been growing rapidly in recent years and a sign of the maturity of the community is that we are starting to see these types of events being held and we hope that by supporting the conference it will go a small way toward encouraging future conferences and meetups.

Feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post FOSS4G Oceania appeared first on Gaia Resources.

At the time Gaia Resources had four full-time staff and a few casuals and most of the work we were doing was GIS-related. Ten years is an eternity for any tech company but fast forward to today and we have almost twenty staff and most of our work is related to software engineering and much of my day is focused on supervising operations and managing projects.

I’ve trawled through the archives for a few old photos and my short and sweet welcome blog post written by Piers, which made me realise that I look exactly the same as I did when I started at Gaia Resources. Whether that means I looked old then or young now I’ll let others decide.

Scholarship Presentation 2011

Gaia Resources is a special place to be, with a lot of people that are committed to the work that we do and the impact that it has on the world and that is what has kept me around for ten years, and hopefully another ten.

Feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post Andrew’s 10 Year Anniversary appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Android version was much requested when we released the initial iOS version, so we were pleased to be given the opportunity to work on it.

To recap from our last blog post –

“The Marine Parks app allows you to search for marine parks and look at what activities are allowed in those areas (including fishing rules and bag limits). This mapping functionality also includes interesting visitor sites and attractions, as well as details of some of the wildlife that is found in these marine parks.”

You can download the Android version of the app from the Google Play Store here and the existing iOS is still available from the Apple App Store here.

If you have any queries about the app, or how we can help you with your own mobile app development, then feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post Marine Parks App for Android appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This project was built using our SurveyEngine toolkit, similarly to the recent Black Cockatoo Community Wisdom Survey (see our recent blog on that project here).  The project is summarised really well on their landing page:

This survey will ask you questions about your use of parks and green spaces (i.e., no entry fee or membership required) in your local area and around Perth. We are interested in what areas you visit and for what activities.

We are currently testing our survey and require people over the age of 18 to complete the 10 minute survey at two different time points that records details of recent park use. 

If you agree to take part, we will ask you for your email address so that several days after first completing the survey we can contact you again and ask you to complete the survey for a second time. The purpose of this is to test our data collection methods and evaluate our survey design.

The survey starts like a normal survey; it asks you to register and then sends you a “please validate your email address” email to get started.  The system then assigns you to one of two groups of users – one who gets maps, and one who doesn’t.  This is to support some A/B Testing that tests if the use of web maps is beneficial (and there will be some research on this in the future from CBEH).

The address selection with a nice mapping interface and address (or junction!) geocoder

Once validated, you then put in your home address (or nearest street corner) which is then georeferenced on the first map.  From here, you indicate if you’ve been to any parks in recent times, and the system then either gives you a map or an input box to pick a park, centered on your address, and then you fill out some information on your use of that park.

The component of the survey about your park use

Once you’ve filled out your details, and some demographic information, then the survey ends.  And three days later, you get another email reminder to come back and fill out some more information.  The team at CBEH then can hit a specific secured URL and the system will generate a data dump of the responses for them, which nicely closes the loop on the data.

The system is another SurveyEngine implementation, and as part of our ongoing evolution, it’s actually been developed in serverless infrastructure, using a range of services in Amazon Web Services (AWS).  This is a pretty new set of technologies (you can read more about the AWS serverless offerings here), and we’re using this in a few different areas already, like these SurveyEngine projects.  We even had Ben run an internal “What is Serverless” session at our regular drinks on a recent Friday which has us all thinking about the various possibilities of this technology stack.

Anyway, CBEH has been up and running for some time at https://survey.perthgreenspace.com.au/ – if you live in Perth, go and record some information about your use of the parks and green spaces in your area – and go into the draw for a $250 Coles/Myer voucher!

If you want to know more about how we can help you with custom mapping based surveys, or about serverless technologies, then feel free to drop me a line (andrew@gaiaresources.com.au) or start a conversation with us on  Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post Parks and Green Space Surveys appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The new Wildlife Licensing System homepage

The previous Wildlife Licensing System (WLS) within the Department was starting to show signs of age, and with some of the reviews and planned improvements, the replacement of the WLS was seen as a high priority.

Our team – Tony, Serge and myself – were brought in to work closely with the team from the Licensing branch, and with representatives from the Science and Conservation Division (SCD) and the Office of Information Management (OIM) for the delivery of this system.

We worked with the team using Agile methods, meaning that we ran the project as a series of sprints, which was a good approach in this case, and one that we are quite familiar with.  We ended up focusing sprints on not just epics (such as “Application Lifecycle”), but also on the delivery of particular licence types.  The Agile methodology can deliver great outcomes for clients; this project was no different.

While Tony, Serge and I worked on the main WLS application, the SCD and Licensing team were gathering additional requirements for the next sprint, and testing the work we’d done in the previous sprint.  This meant that there was a lot of people spending time on the project, but it also is one of the reasons it has been so well received.  Meanwhile, OIM supported the project with a project manager and also developed other supporting systems, like the password-less login component and the payment gateway, which our team integrated with.  We also had the OIM team undertaking code reviews and doing the builds for the project.

To help keep this broad team together, the Department became our home for much of the last few months.  That had upsides in that we were able to have access to the clients pretty much on-demand (and roasts on Thursdays at the canteen), and downsides, in that we were away from the rest of the Gaia Resources team and working in unfamiliar surroundings – but once we were buried in the project, it quickly became familiar surroundings.

One of the things that we realised is that we were quite lucky to have a client in the Department of Parks and Wildlife that had already embraced Agile methods, and in addition is a real proponent of open source solutions.  The WLS is another of their projects that will be made open source and available through their Github repository .  While Piers might sometimes despair about the uptake of open source in Australia (see his clickbait article here) there are some organisations that are making the most of it – like the Department.

If you want to know more about how we can work with you in this Agile manner, feel free to get in touch with me via email, or have a chat to us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post Wildlife Licensing appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Marine Parks app allows you to search for marine parks and look at what activities are allowed in those areas (including fishing rules and bag limits).  This mapping functionality also includes interesting visitor sites and attractions, as well as details of some of the wildlife that is found in these marine parks.

Some screenshots from the Marine Parks app, showing the park listing, park landing page and wildlife listings

The app itself is a bit of a beast at 370MB, but this is to allow for the offline use of the app.  Western Australia’s 13 marine parks are scattered around the State and some – such as the Rowley Shoals – are well outside of mobile phone range (and hence, a data connection for a live map).  However, the desire was that people using the app could continue to do so outside of a data connection, so the app contains enough mapping data to allow you to navigate when offline in these remote areas.

This offline maps feature presented us with a challenge due to the need to zoom into quite a lot of detail, but also to keep the application data size relatively small.  Essentially, the more zoom levels that you allow within a map, the larger number of map tiles required – and the larger the app becomes.  So there is a tradeoff between the application size becoming “too large” but at the same time the maps must have enough content to be useful.  Since there were also many small Marine Parks that required an high level of detail for a user to determine their zone location, the best solution was to compress all the map tile images and package them into single zip files.  The result was relatively small application size with a generous number of zoom levels.

An example of the mapping and spatial intersection of your location with the marine zones, indicating the activities you can do in those areas

As with all of our development for the Department, we work very closely with their own developers.  In the case of our mobile apps, we create the app and provide the source code to the Departmental staff so that they can then upload it to the App store and manage it from there.  This arrangement also means that Departmental staff can build on the apps we provide to them in the future.

We have done some preliminary planning with the Department about an Android version of the app in the future, but for now, you can download the app from the iTunes store via the link here, or scan the QR code below with your iPhone.

If you have any queries about the app, or how we can help you with your own mobile app development, then feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post Marine Parks of WA in your pocket… appeared first on Gaia Resources.

• WMS caching – WMS layers are now cached within QGIS by default
• Virtual layers – QGIS can now run SQL queries dynamically on any type of layer
• Support for more GDAL/OGR file extensions – Who doesn’t like more supported formats?

QGIS 2.14 is also special in that it is a long term release (LTR), the first since 2.8 in February 2015. LTRs are ideal for corporate users or anyone that prefers to update less frequently as they are guaranteed to be supported with bug fixes for one year from release.

As this is a long term release we are planning on updating our Environmental QGIS Training course to support this release. We have had strong current interest in the course over the last month, so we are expecting to run a public course in April featuring the new 2.14 release (look out for details).  If you are interested, drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au!

If you haven’t already tried QGIS then we’d recommend that you go and download the 2.14 release from the QGIS website here.

Andrew

P.S. Feel free to contact us through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or leave a comment below.

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