Having a job that offers flexibility in working hours for mums and dads can be just the solution for working around the chaos and pressure. I am one of those lucky ones who can work just about any time from remote locations to get my hours done. There are client meetings that need to be met, but the majority of my work can really be done at any time. This means I can spread the work out, and still be available to my colleagues when they need my insights.

As long as the communications are good and the job gets done, then all is well. Right? Not exactly. 

Working remotely and unusual hours means co-workers can assume you are available anytime. There’s no point saying flexible and remote is perfect, because it is not. No working arrangement is. You may find yourself being communicated to at unexpected times, or times when your kids really need you, but you still feel pressure to respond immediately. Having your hours spread-out and not always at consistent times, means it’s difficult for colleagues to know when you are available, even if you have a digital on/off signal system running like we use in our internal Chat system. This compounds when working on multiple projects as the respective teams have two layers of abstraction (e.g. Is she on? And if so, is she on my project?).

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

But if you are like me and really like your job, there’s a two-way sense of responsibility and you make it work. I am no expert at juggling – in fact I cannot type an email and talk to someone else at the same time like some can, but here are some things I am trying out to make it work:

• • Try to not feel guilty for not being there 9.00 – 5.00 everyday: I actually feel guilty all the time, but I shouldn’t… Actually, at Gaia Resources we are not just accommodating the occasional child screen bombing an online meeting; we support flexibility for all, where making a doctor’s appointment or having to run some errands then making up the time later is not an issue. 
  • Let my digital signatures do the talking: I may have missed that conversation at 9.00am, but I laid the groundwork for what we’re doing earlier that morning at 5.00am. It’s easy to feel anxious when you can’t join the big conversations first thing in the morning, or at lunch, or start thinking that people might be judging you for not being part of these conversations. But I let my work do the talking, and know that I’ll always contribute when I’m needed, and there’s a timestamp to show.
  • Lay down some boundaries: there may be some mystery about whether I’m on but I have set some specific times and that I will not be on. Tuesday morning and Fridays are out, and that is the same every week. These times are for my fitness class that I teach and special times with my son.
  • Congratulate myself on the wins: if I get to have some quality time with my son or some positive engagements with clients or colleagues, I celebrate that what I am doing is worthwhile.

I do my best to make this work, but there’s always room for improvement. It doesn’t help that I do have some workaholic tendencies (working as a business analyst AND fitness instructor AND a dedicated mum and wife AND wanting to start a personal development project to automate museum specimen label digitisation etc.). But, I love data and I love the chance to work with institutes like universities, museums, and archives to make sense of their complex data problems and inter-related system requirements.

What I am talking about is not new, and I am glad to say that Gaia Resources continues to evaluate our procedures to help our employees where we can. It is nice to see there is even a push from government for employers to be more supportive of flexible working arrangements https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/not-taboo-to-ask-anymore-employers-sign-up-to-family-friendly-push-20210517-p57soi .

So, what are some of your tips and tricks to make flexible, remote work, WORK? Please share in the comments,  email me or start a conversation with us on one of our social media platforms –  Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Mieke

The post Remote Flexible Work Pitfalls for Parents appeared first on Gaia Resources.

On Wednesday 9 December, Chris Roach and I attended a webinar hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), celebrating its 10 years of existence and showcasing research into the role of Big Data and data science modelling techniques in managing Australian biodiversity. It was a chance for me to also reflect on my journey in parallel with the ALA in the early days when I was at the Western Australian Museum. I was involved there in aligning the Arachnology database fields with the TDWG Darwin Core standard, so the web team could mobilise our data; then later in environmental consulting; and now here at Gaia Resources where we share much of the ideals of the ALA in enabling open biodiversity data sharing and aligning to internationally recognised standards.

The following provides a summary of some of the important research that was described in this particular seminar series of three speakers.

With platforms such as the ALA, the amount of biodiversity data available has dramatically increased in the last 10 years and empowered biodiversity conservation with so much more confidence in actions undertaken; but many of the ecological challenges that we have faced in the past still remain. These challenges can be summed up in three main areas:

• Sampling bias,
• Incomplete coverage and,
• Data quality.

Professor Melodie McGeoch (La Trobe University) discussed the importance of not just focusing on documenting populations of threatened, vulnerable, and endangered species; but also the need to recognise the importance of occurrence data for “common” species. Whether a species is recognised as common depends on temporal trends, local abundance, and spatial range; and significant declines in any of these areas may go unnoticed when a species is thought to be common enough not to require frequent monitoring. In terms of identifying refuges for preventing diversity and biomass decline, Prof. McGeoch advocated for the modelling of ALA and other data of both rare and common species at a more localised level to understand geographic variation and abundance over time.

PhD candidate Tianxiao (August) Hao (University of Melbourne) used his research in fungal diversity in Australia to show the rapid increase in data availability. Some of this data, however, is unreliable, and so careful consideration must be taken prior to analysis as to whether the data is of a high enough standard to be useful. He acknowledged the new technology and rigorous screening that new data submitted to the ALA undergoes and the large clean up operation that is underway to increase the quality of legacy data.

Both August and Professor Jane Elith (University of Melbourne) demonstrated how the available data is still biased greatly by sampling effort due to environmental or logistical constraints. It makes sense that the easiest to reach places, such as areas near population centres, coastlines and, along roads are the most heavily sampled.

Professor Elith also highlighted the much forgotten bias introduced by a deficiency in absence data. Most ‘observation’ records are for presence data, but having knowledge of what areas have been sampled (and how) without finding occurrences, is possibly of equal significance to documenting the presence of species. Predictive modelling of species distributions are so much more powerful when they can account for bias and ideally this presence-absence type of data capture should be integrated into research and citizen science initiatives.

Professor Elith showcased the eBird initiative as a good example of where using citizen science can provide comprehensive coverage of occurrence data over time.

Gaia Resources is no stranger to considerations of presence-absence data and has developed several Citizen Science solutions over the years. We have also worked with conservation groups like the Great Victoria Desert Biodiversity Trust to plan habitat survey strategies (check out our blog here).

With the help of open-access biodiversity data such as that provided by the ALA, we can all play a part in overcoming the challenges faced in conservation. Here’s to the next 10 years!

If you’d like to know more about this topic or would like to discuss your own Big Data and biodiversity projects, please drop me a line at mieke.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Mieke

The post The ALA and Big Data for Biodiversity appeared first on Gaia Resources.