As you can see on the map below, we’ve held a few commercial courses in our Perth office, and a range of custom courses around Australia, with our most recent being a custom course held for an environmental consultancy on the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Our QGIS Training courses and attendees interactive map (powered by GRID)

We’ve always done our best to support the environmental community around Australia, and as part of our offerings for these courses, we have reached out to a few of the professional bodies around Australia, including the Environmental Consultants Association (Western Australia), and the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand (at least, to the Western Australian, South East Queensland and Far North Queensland chapters).

For members of these groups we have offered a 25% discount on our commercial Environmental QGIS Training course (see this link for details of the course), bringing the two day course down from $1,000 (ex GST) to $750 (ex GST).

We also want to help support our up and coming environmental professionals.  If you are a full-time student enrolled in a tertiary environmental course, we will open up ‘spare’ training places on our course for you for $100 (ex GST).  Once we have confirmed the minimum number of regular participants (five), and if there are spaces left one week before the course, we will open the remaining places for you on standby.

We haven’t taken the approach of running a regular course as we would rather respond to the demand as it appears.  So, if you are interested in coming along to a QGIS training course – and no prior GIS experience is necessary – then email us at training@gaiaresources.com.au to indicate you’re interested and we’ll arrange a commercial course when we get enough people!

You can also contact us at any time to discuss the course – or perhaps running a custom course for your organisation – by contacting either Piers or myself in our Perth office on (08) 92277309, or by dropping a line to the training@gaiaresources.com.au email address.

Otherwise, please feel free to spread this far and wide (you’ll see this also on our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts).

James

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• Data management for NRMs – a bugbear resolved
• Under GRID’s hood
• State NRM gets GRID

You can read more about the project in its entirety here, but for now, this blog focuses on the “GRID Linkages” component of the project.

One of GRID’s main purposes is to provide easy to use, web based data entry for a Natural Resource Management (NRM) organisation – especially for their on-ground events. We call these on-ground events “Activities” and can be things like fencing, revegetation or plantings, community events, weeding and feral animal control (and there are a lot of different other Activities that NRMs use). Each one of these Activities has a series of fields with which to record the necessary information about it (driven by the reporting that is required, often from funding processes). These fields and all the parameters that go with them (like the type of field, drop down list values* and symbology) is what we call the “Schema”, and this is the part that we work with the NRM groups to customise for their own purposes when we set up GRID with them.

At the roadmap workshop we ran way back in 2015, the GRID community wanted a way to more easily administer the Schema of their GRID instance, as well as sharing these Schema (and potentially the Activity data) between GRID instances.  This functionality would also go a long way in helping to facilitate collaboration between NRM’s in moving towards a standard way of reporting across the board.  After gathering requirements from all the participating NRM groups, this functionality has been developed, and has been released for testing.

This new functionality allows a GRID Administrator to export one or more Activity Schemas to a readable spreadsheet format.  The GRID Administrator can then use this spreadsheet to manage their own Schema (by making any changes directly to the spreadsheet) which can then be imported back into their GRID – or, which is even more exciting, into a completely different instance of GRID, meaning that other groups can learn and build upon the customisation that one NRM does.

The new interface for exporting and importing Schema – also using the new data table capability

This functionality also supports the sharing of data between GRID instances by mirroring the Activity Schema in both, and then by using the easy export/import process for Activity data, via the Bulk Upload tool that is already within GRID.  This is one thing that funding bodies, like State NRM, are keen on – as they will be able to create Schemas in their own GRID, and then provide these as templates to other GRID Administrators for their reporting.  This will mean that reporting back to these funding bodies will be much easier and simpler, and this is one area where we still have a way to go as a community to make it even easier!

We’re looking at this whole “Linkages” functionality as an exclusively manual process at the moment – the Administrators prepare Schema, export it and send to another GRID Administrator, who then uses it to capture Activity data, export that data and send back to the originator.  Keeping this as a manual process is a great way to start with any process, before we look at opportunities to automate it (with appropriate checks and balances) in the future.  But for now, this is exactly what our GRID community wanted, with the manual checks and balances, and we’ve delivered this now to the groups prior to the next GRID release for their feedback.

It’s a very busy time for our GRID team, and a number of other enhancements have made it into the current testing round, which you can check out via the latest GRID release notes here.  Once these have been tested by the community, then the rollout will commence, and all of the GRID instances that are now up and running will be updated.

If you want to know more about GRID, or just discuss how we can help you with spatial data management, feel free to drop me a line, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

James

*Piers’ edit: Controlled vocabularies FTW!

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This is the first of a series of posts documenting the progress of the GRID enhancement project, which covers a critical component of any spatial platform – data management.

Centralised data sourcing

Problem
While GRID provides a cloud solution for the management of both on-ground activities (e.g. fencing, revegetation, beach clean-ups) and reference information (e.g. hydrology, roads, imagery) there is still the need to source the latter data sets from relevant custodians. Once acquired this data must be managed effectively to ensure data versions, metadata and licence details are easily accessible and continually updated – a common bugbear for any group or organisation working with spatial data.

Solution
This project provisions for the centralised sourcing and management of all reference data (or baselayers) for the participating NRM groups until June 2018, which will all be consumable online through GRID.

This component will be completed by:

• Engagement with NRM staff to establish baselayer preferences,
• Engagement with data custodians to consolidate the data sourcing and licencing process,
• Logging all sourced information to a data management standard, which will be shared amongst the NRMs,
• Uploading or updating all baselayers on GRID for each NRM group,
• Establishing direct web map services where possible to ensure continuation of services beyond the life of the project.

This is a much anticipated component, saving a lot of time and effort both for the NRM groups and the data custodians.

If you would like to know more about how we could help you with your data bugbears, please get in touch directly via james.houston@gaiaresources.com.au. Or, feel free to start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or call us on 08 9227 7309.

James

The post Data management for NRMs – a bugbear resolved appeared first on Gaia Resources.

You can read more about GRID here but in a nutshell it is an easy-to-use online system designed with and for Natural Resource Management (NRM) groups that provides for the collection and reporting of on-ground activities and events. Thanks to the recent State NRM Capability grants GRID is also currently undergoing a whole bunch of enhancements, which all GRID users will benefit from.

The process of rolling out a new GRID instance involves:

• Create a staging/testing site to confirm the theme (logos, styling),
• Working closely with NRM staff to ensure the setup closely resembles their in-house program and project management protocols,
• Establish data collecting and reporting standards for on-ground work,
• Source and upload useful base layers that NRM staff can utilise for reference purposes (these are contextual spatial datasets, like imagery and topography),
• Once all that is finalised, we roll out a new production site and provide on-site hands-on training (as shown below!).

NACC staff getting some hands-on training so they can hit the ground running. 

That’s it! Staff can be up and running on a new GRID instance within a couple of weeks, especially if they are already collecting data in standard formats and have some existing GIS data.  We then provide ongoing support to the organisation through our hosting, maintenance and support agreements, so that we are always on hand to help.

There is also a new State NRM GRID instance in the program for the capability grant, which in the short term will facilitate the submission of grant applications to State NRM and in the longer term it is envisioned that state-wide reporting standards can be established, increasing collaboration and more landscape-scale knowledge outcomes for Western Australia.  This is an exciting new chapter in GRID use!

If you’d like to know more about GRID please leave a comment below – or email me directly via james.houston@gaiaresources.com.au.  Or, feel free to start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

James

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Raster processing is one of the areas we cover in our QGIS training course – find out more here.

As always these latest round of courses has garnered interest from all sorts of sectors including Natural Resource Management (NRM), Local Government/Shires, Department of Fire and Emergency Services and private consultants. This highlights the diverse application of GIS and the trend of it becoming mainstream for many environmental positions – and QGIS is the best free desktop GIS software available by a country kilometre.

The upcoming dates and locations are:

• Bridgetown – 9th/10th of November, 2016 – this training is being run in conjunction with the Virtual Innovation Hub for capacity building in NRM. Priority is given to NRM practitioners – however if you are interested please get in touch and subject to availability you may be able to be accommodated.
• Brisbane – Early 2017 (date and venue are still TBC). With our new Brisbane presence, we are offering all our solutions via this local presence, so please get in touch via the details below to register your interest.

If you are interested in some QGIS training either give me a call directly on (08) 9227 7309, email me at james@gaiaresources.com.au or feel free to leave us a note on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn!

James

The post Spring back to QGIS appeared first on Gaia Resources.

There’s a parallel story here – Damien Hassan from SROWA has been working on the same thing, and has published a blog on their site about their works on the historical sewerage plans.

Damien is actually one of our past QGIS trainees, and he came along to do our two day course some time ago, so that he could pick up the basics of QGIS and how to do the georeferencing.  With QGIS being a free, open source package (you can go and download it right now from here) this made it a lot easier to get started for Damien.  After doing our course, Damien went back to start working on georeferencing the historical plans.  He’s set himself a pretty massive task, with there being 2,202 plans to work through!

An example from Damien’s blog post

We’re also interested to hear from other people in the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) who might be interested in spatial tools for this sort of work.  We are currently working through several new offerings for the GLAM sector, such as hosted collection management, archival management and digital preservation tools, and a custom GLAM QGIS course seems like something that might be of interest to a range of people!

We do have a QGIS course coming up next week, so get in touch with us if you want to get started on QGIS!

Drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au, leave us a comment below, or start a conversation with us via on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

James

The post Geo-referencing Archives with QGIS appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The current QGIS training we’ve done – showing locations and trainees

Here at Gaia Resources we have implemented QGIS to help a range of organisations – particularly the Natural Resource Management (NRM) community and environmental consultancies.  We have a few organisations that we’ve worked with using QGIS that have reduced their costs for GIS software (especially in conjunction with our GRID product and ongoing support plans), enhanced the productivity of their teams and we have seen the use of GIS really starting to become a mainstream requirement of many environmental positions.  We even use it a lot ourselves (although we also remain software agnostic and have most of the main GIS packages here for our use).

To help support this demand, we are running additional training courses for the end of the year, and this includes our first offering in Brisbane as well!  The courses we run here in Leederville cost $1,000 (ex GST) per person for the two day course (you can see the outline here) – and this includes a whole afternoon of you “bringing your own problem” to the course.  We run the courses with a minimum number of five people attending, and then we open the course up to students at the lower cost of $100 (ex GST) per person to fill it up (in Perth, to a maximum of eight).

The upcoming dates for our courses are:

• Perth – 18th/19th of October, 2016 – We are looking for a few more people to confirm the course, and we won’t run another one this year in Perth, so this will be your last chance for a few months.  Get in touch with us soon to book your place.
• Bridgetown – 9th/10th of November, 2016 – this training is being run in conjunction with the Virtual Innovation Hub for capacity building in NRM. Priority is given to NRM practitioners however if you are interested please get in touch via us, subject to availability you may be able to be accommodated.
• Brisbane – early December, 2016 (date and venue are still TBC) – we are travelling across to Brisbane regularly these days and we are looking to run our first QGIS course in Brisbane!

If you are interested in any of these courses, either give me a call directly on (08) 9227 7309, email me at james@gaiaresources.com.au or feel free to leave us a note on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn!

James

The post QGIS leaping ahead appeared first on Gaia Resources.

 Want to learn where in the world is (and how to pronounce) the name of the latest QGIS release? Click here!

QGIS rolls out new versions every 4 months complete with a suite of fixes or useful functionality enhancements. While this is quite frequent there is also an annual Long Term Release (LTR) version which is maintained until the next LTR is released providing some stability for integration into corporate systems and is the version we use for our training courses.

Check out the QGIS changelog for a detailed account of the latest enhancements to QGIS. As you will see there are many of them, which is testament to the developer community giving up their time or sponsorship dollars provisioning for some paid developer hours.  Highlights for me include the additions to the map composer such as the ability to draw graphical images from your map canvas (instead of only geometry features from the workspace), dynamically linking tables and labels via HTML when using the map atlas and georeferencing PDF (or TIF) exports.

Also – get ready for a big shake up when version 3.0 comes along, which plans to completely re-design the interface and major workflows for an even better user experience (no plans for a release date yet but developers have been encouraged to commit time to it post version 2.16).

It also was time for another training course, and we recently had another bunch of keen trainees learning the QGIS ropes over two days.  Our QGIS training course for environmental practitioners is a great way to hit the ground running using the biggest and best open source (and free) desktop GIS software in the world.

Whether you’re a newbie to GIS or in need of a software changeover this course caters for both. There is also a half day to run through custom workflows or data issues that are specific to your needs.

More QGIS trainees from regional shires, Natural Resource Management and the Emergency Services industries

There is another course planned for October so please get in touch with me directly if you would like to register your interest by emailing training@gaiaresources.com.au or calling our office on 9227 7309.  If you would like to know more about QGIS and how we can help roll it out for your group or organisation please drop me an email, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

James

The post QGIS version 2.16 released (and training!) appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This was a pilot survey so SBR can assess the viability of using drones periodically for their environmental monitoring requirements. We contracted Andrew Moore from Aerial Environment to undertake the survey, and I was there more as a glorified bird watcher (who knows as much about birds as the next person who doesn’t know about birds) and to help optimise SBR’s GIS systems – spotting birds is actually quite critical given the tendency of Wedgies to rip drones from the sky (we were lucky enough to see two of these majestic creatures but luckily not in the middle of a flight).

Flight from Shark Bay to Useless Loop on a 1965 Cessna 182H – Approaching a salt stack

While some time was spent grappling with our testosterone levels in between flights (picture three blokes in a ute with high vis discussing the intricacies of Thermomixes) we made good ground in the allocated 1.5 days capturing a range of seagrass, mangrove and revegetation areas.  Cloud cover was a bit of an issue with the varying light levels but for the most part it was perfect drone flying weather. Pre-setting the flight plan and watching the drone take off and do its thing in such a beautiful setting was quite other worldly (click on the images to enlarge).

Flying the drone and propping up a ute

A preliminary look at the data revealed some fantastic results. A number of different flight heights were trialled ranging from around 60 metres to no more than 118 metres and subsequent resolution ranged from just over 3 cm to around 6 cm.

Seagrass delineation

Some stands of Mangroves in the Shark Bay area have quite small crowns (in higher salinity areas), so capturing high resolution imagery is extremely beneficial for the monitoring of individual crowns and therefore the overall health of the system; depending on the consistency of imagery capture there is the potential for automated raster classification, something we are looking into for SBR.

Mangroves – individual plants clearly visible

Mangroves – preliminary raster classification

It is also possible to decipher individual species from the revegetation areas.

Revegetation – individual species visible

A high resolution Digital Surface Model is shown below, which reveals clear gradients of individual rocks and boulders beneath the surface of the water (top right), and that is our ute on the bottom left.

Digital Surface Model – see our mode of transport bottom left

There are obviously many other options with collecting imagery over and above orthorectification/stitching for your classical basemap, including oblique shots, contours, 3D models, high definition videos and with the increasing development of light-weight sensors for drones the remote sensing options will become limitless.

How many people does it take to fly a drone? Apparently three (bottom left)

And I couldn’t resist introducing you to Ray, the site manager, who was particularly interested in the drone (we later spotted him on the captured imagery).

Ray – Site Manager

If you are interested in finding out how we can help you with your drone mapping needs or ideas, then leave me a comment below, email me directly here or you can start a conversation with us via Twitter, LinkedIn or our Facebook page.

James

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Just look at the Phantom 4, so packed with unbridled futuristic technology it is akin to the smart phone in our pockets – and it can be controlled by one as well. For around $2,500 you can now buy a bit of kit that can take super high resolution imagery over relatively large areas (it can travel up to five km from its base with 30 minutes flight time). Only years ago this type of capability would have cost $10s of thousands, and five years ago you would not have seen much change from $100k. The speed at which this technology is changing in the last two years alone is incredible.

However, there’s been a lot of issues with drones in the past (and Piers talked about it at a previous Georabble), and there are many protocols to follow when using them.  While the equipment is getting cheaper, it is critical to ensure the operators are not only accredited under the Civil Aviation Safety Authority but also have a proven track record of safe and professional drone piloting and imagery acquisition.  We have contracted Andrew Moore from Aerial Environment – who fits all these bills – to capture mangrove and seagrass imagery for an upcoming project in Shark Bay enabling us to accurately map and evaluate the distributions, which is scheduled for the end of May.

 Andrew with his pet drone

To prepare for the upcoming Shark Bay trip Andrew conducted a ‘dry run’ of the Bunbury Mangroves in the Leschenault Inlet, which he and I then jointly presented during some recent GIS training at the South West Catchment Council (SWCC) to showcase the viability of drones for their on-ground work.  We actually loaded the imagery directly into SWCC’s GRID instance for the demonstrations.

The imagery in GRID

The imagery (a more detailed version can be seen below) was captured at an altitude of 260 ft, which Andrew said is the ‘sweet spot’ for resolution and coverage. At this height Andrew captured all the Mangroves within the inlet in 15 minutes with a resolution of four cm! You can actually see small sections of individual plants that have suffered die-off, along with their complex root systems.  To top this off the ‘out of the box’ camera also collects enough data to create a 3D model of the entire area, enabling fly-throughs from any height showing individual mangroves!

Captured imagery of the Bunbury Mangroves (click on the image)

I can’t wait to see the drone in action again when Andrew and I head up to Shark Bay in the next couple of weeks.

It certainly seems that the viability of acquiring beautiful, high-resolution imagery for conservation groups with limited budgets is greatly improved and can translate into real efficiencies for environmental planning and monitoring with virtually no environmental impact.  When quality gear is coupled with a quality operator, like Andrew, then the sky is really the limit!

If you would like further information about how this sort of imagery might be useful for your organisation, you can email me directly here or you can start a conversation with us via Twitter, LinkedIn or our Facebook page.

James

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QGIS training has been a very successful area for us, particularly with interest from environmental practitioners (you can see a web map here showing the distribution of our custom QGIS training locations to-date). We continually update our QGIS training course to ensure that we always train on the latest long term release version and I’ve recently just updated the course once again for the latest QGIS long-term release (version 2.14).

At the start of the month I was back in Albany alongside South Coast Natural Resource Management (SCNRM) Spatial Information Officer Nick Middleton. Together we delivered QGIS training to interested SCNRM staff that consisted of a recap from the previous two day course with additional bespoke training.  In this section, we looked at the integration of QGIS with their project management tools and their GRID system (along with some advanced raster symbolising and processing for the super keen).

Then, I ran some slightly different – and very custom – QGIS training.  This was a day of very interactive training with the GIS team from the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES), held at the Emergency Services Complex in Cockburn Central. The DFES GIS team were interested in learning a new tool to add to their already extensive armoury, so this was really a ‘train the GIS professionals’ type course.  This included a comparison of their existing systems to see how QGIS could be integrated.

DFES GIS staff blitzing QGIS

The DFES team were impressed with the extensive library of tools and algorithms, which is quickly approaching over 1000 tools – and all freely available! Additionally, QGIS connected seamlessly (read and write) to their SQL Server database, and coupled with QGIS’s offline editing mode there is great potential for it to become an important part of the DFES GIS capability.

Before the month is out I will also be back with the team at the South West Catchment Council. This will be a tailor made course to streamline the link between field work and reporting using GPS, QGIS and GRID.

In addition to these types of custom courses we also offer a commercial QGIS course here at our Leederville office. Click here to find out more but we are planning to offer a commercial course at the end of May 2016.  You can register your interest in the course by emailing training@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alternatively you can email me directly here or contact us via Twitter, LinkedIn or our Facebook page.

James

The post More QGIS Custom Training! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We have been involved with Bush Blitz for some time, helping build their capacity to capture biodiversity information on the ground with mobile testing and hosting/administering their Bush Blitz website.

As with any conservation initiative, public engagement is vital both in terms of increasing awareness of the many environmental issues, but also in garnering both financial and volunteer support to ensure the longer term success.  Bush Blitz is really no different, and as part of the longer term plans we have previously developed with ABRS, the first phase is to move the Bush Blitz website onto one of the most widely used open source Content Management Systems (CMS) out there, WordPress.  This is not only an open source system, it is also freely available.  Our experience is that WordPress is one of the easiest CMSs for clients to administer and add content; with the plethora of plugins there is always something to make life easier.  Wordpress fits in really well with the longer term strategy for ABRS, which includes a high degree of self-sufficiency.

So off I went on a nice little trip to Canberra to provide a day of hands-on WordPress training to the Bush Blitz team.

It was tough going being nestled in the Australian National Botanical Gardens!

Migrating to WordPress allows complete self-sufficiency for the Bush Blitz team in keeping their website content up-to-date. All their news, stories and expeditions will now be added to the site as interactive blogs instead of static pages, which will further increase their visibility online. The CMS also enhances the ability for direct feedback and contribution from interested volunteers and the general public, which is very easy to manage through the WordPress admin interface.

Some of the Bush Blitz team getting down and dirty with WordPress

The training went really well and I am already seeing a whole bunch of new posts and other content up on the site days after my return. This will continue until the staff are happy all is in order to take the site live, but you can view the existing Bush Blitz website here to see all the great work they are doing.  We’ll be releasing the new web site in the near future.

It was great to finally meet all the team members face to face and I thoroughly enjoyed my brief visit to Canberra (the friendliest bus and taxi drivers anywhere!)

James

Leave a comment below, email me, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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