We thought that this is an opportune time to release a blog about the updates – Tracey and Chris have also been updating the user manual with all these changes as well, so you can see the details in that online resource.

Streamlining Monitoring

There has been quite a bit of work in the recent updates on the Monitoring component of the Medical Entomology module.  Firstly, there are a range of workflow modifications on the Adult and Larval Monitoring forms to bring them to a more consistent look and feel, which has been something that has bugged a few of us involved in the project (that have some OCD tendencies).  This has mainly been cosmetic, but it certainly means that the system feels a lot more consistent.

One of the new functionality changes is the addition of “Spot Treatment” on the Larval Monitoring forms (see below), which is the first of the treatment components we are releasing (see Chris’ previous blog about further research into treatment areas we ran with the City of Bayswater).

The new Spot Treatment form

The Spot Treatment form simply allows you to record the treatment you might do at the end of a larval monitoring session – i.e. when you have finished dipping at a site, and then decide to immediately treat the site by applying some chemical.  This was an important thing to add, because what this does is allow us to place a specific line showing treatment on the Larval Monitoring reports – so you can start to see the efficacy of the treatment at a site, like in the sample graph we used in testing below – the abundance of larvae drops, and you can see the bright red line indicating this is because of a treatment.

An example chart showing mosquito larvae dropping off after treatment

There has also been a new function added to both monitoring components, namely the integration with the Bureau of Meteorology weather services.

If your site is within a 50km radius of a Bureau of Meteorology weather station, and the date and time on your observation is within the last 72 hours, then we match up to the nearest station and bring across a set of environmental variables from the weather station automatically, and the closest record in terms of time to your observation.  These five fields (air temperature, humidity, cloud cover, wind direction and wind speed) are sourced from the weather station live feed, and are then transformed into the units that we use in the Atlas (e.g. converting wind speed from knots to a category value).  This all happens behind the scenes – and even from the mobile apps, which do this populating process when the records arrive at the server after a mobile synchronisation.

The new Bureau of Meteorology weather integration fields

Of course, you can also populate these fields yourself from the field in your own set of forms – as we know that microclimate at the local site might well be quite different from a weather station 50 kilometers away!

Additional Reporting

One of the ‘missing’ components of the Medical Entomology workflow was the Larval Reporting, and that’s been upgraded in this latest release to match the types of reports we also provide for the Adult trapping data, namely:

• Charting site abundance – seeing the total numbers of larvae over time for a site,
• Instar chart site abundance – seeing the breakdown of the various instar percentages over time at a site (as shown above), and
• Abundance map – showing the abundance of larvae on a mapping background.

The interesting one here was the mapping one – in the Adult report we can make a series of pie charts that are coloured by species, but we can’t do the same for larvae.  So in this mapping component, we simply produce a series of different sized circles according to the abundance of larvae, like the map below (using a variety of real and test data for the Victoria).

 An example abundance map for larvae

There’s also been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on the graphing components across the board on the graphing and charting components of this component of the system, which has all come about because of the heavy use of the system by our new Victorian counterparts – the amounts of data coming in from them has really given us an impetus to make a range of additional upgrades and changes to the system to account for the new volumes (and high frequency!) of data coming in.

Existing users will also note a couple of additional reporting changes, including the addition of filters on the Review Records screen, and a brand new Export Data function that allows users to export all of their data from the system.  We really feel that these two additional functions are great ways to get more productivity into the Atlas, and both flow on from feedback we’ve had from people using the system.

Chemical stock

One of the new requirements we met within Victoria was around managing chemical stocks, as the Department of Health and Human Services provides all the chemical stock to the local governments for treatment, and sometimes needs to know where to get hold of stock for emergency applications or treatments.  So the basic chemical stock management component was introduced to the system in this update.

The simple stock management functionality

In essence, this chemical stock management system is simple and easy to use, and it is the stub for future work on treatments.  Our plans for the future around treatments are to link up the ability to document a treatment event in the system to the stock management – so when a treatment occurs, the stock levels automatically adjust to indicate these chemicals have been used.  While that’s not yet implemented in the system (e.g. the spot treatment component just has two fields for recording chemicals used, but doesn’t yet link to stock management), it’s a great starting point for a future upgrade.

Collaboration and teams

The final point I wanted to raise was the importance of collaboration throughout this last round of updates.

This round of updates was funded from the Department of Health and Human Services (Victoria), and here at Gaia Resources we have also put in additional resources to ensure that a range of things that we feel are important have been added to the system, so we’ve also funded it in that sense.  That’s not unusual for us – we do feel that many of our projects really are about creating long-lasting partnerships rather than doing simple one-off projects, and we put our time (and money) into these partnerships in a very real sense.  Despite not having ‘skin in the game’ as it were, we still had all of the planning and demonstration meetings open to the WA Department of Health, as they were a previous funder of the system.  This was a big part of how good the end result is – getting the main stakeholders in the room has been a key part of the success of these new functions.  So, having Rebecca Feldman (DHHS), Dr. Peter Neville (DoH) and myself in the room as the three ‘clients’ has been a key part in delivering a great outcome for the project.

This has been a big team approach overall for this round of updates.  On the technical side, Serge, James P and Rob have done wonders on the system to make it jump through all the hoops we have needed it to.  Chris has kept us all on track from the project management point of view, and along with Tracey and myself have updating the user manuals and doing a bunch of testing.  Others in our team – like Shay – have also been brought in to help with particular tasks, like getting the cloud infrastructure tuned for performance. So it’s been a massive team effort that I’m really proud to have been involved with, and I’m really happy with the result.

For more information on the Atlas, feel free to contact either Chris or myself in our Perth office on (08) 92277309 – or as always, you can start a conversation with us via social media on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Atlas of Environmental Health – Medical Entomology Update! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We’ve blogged previously about the Atlas of Environmental Health – such as this blog – and this expansion to include other States has been something we have been working towards for a while, with presentations at a couple of conferences like the Mosquito Control Association of Australia, and the CRCSI Conference (that summary presentation is below).  A consolidated national view of mosquito populations, disease outbreaks and control methods across the country is one of the goals we have for the Atlas, so it was great to have Victoria on board with the project.

An update on the Atlas that I gave last year

From late November, we started undertaking some development of the Atlas to support the ability to have Victoria come on board, by adding in State level permissions, a few other tweaks relating to that, and then importing a year’s worth of trapping data from the Department’s lab.  Once that was done, we were ready to head east, and Tracey and I flew across to run training sessions in Swan Hill and Shepparton.  It’s always a bit nerve wracking running training, so we did a fair bit to prepare for the trip.  After a late flight into Melbourne and a good night’s sleep (sort of), we met up with Rebecca Feldman from the Department of Health and Human Services and got on the road to Swan Hill.  I have to say, the Bridgewater Bakehouse makes a fantastic sausage roll!

We undertook the first lot of training at Swan Hill which went well – in a great old building, the Town Hall.  We helped the Environmental Health officers get set up with the mobile app component, which is where they will use the system the most – collecting data on their mosquito traps and dips in the field.  We also gave them a relatively quick run-through of the web side of things, which they’ve been using to do some data QA and to also produce some reports on their areas.  That arvo we drove down to Shepparton and crashed overnight – that first day was a long day of driving, and training is quite exhausting as well – and then we ran a much smaller, but similarly structured, training session in Shepparton before hitting the road back to Melbourne.

We wrapped up the trip with a final session with the Departmental Regional Environmental Officers in the city, where we gave a quick run through again of the system, and explained to this team how they could get their Local Governments set up with the system, and what they needed to be aware of in terms of that setup.  We also had the lab team there who were able to see how they can log in, find the records that correspond with samples that they are sent, and update the species identification components of the trapping data.

Running training in the system in Melbourne

One of the best things about this trip was meeting a bunch of the on-ground staff for the training.  I always think that meeting the end users to discuss their workflows is critical to success – we’ve been doing the same thing for our citizen science programs for some time.  They explained to us how they work – and that’s quite similar to what we expected – but it was great to get confirmation we were delivering useful tools for them.  You can’t underestimate the value in talking directly to the people that are actually using your system!

Since the rollout the Victorians have quickly become ready and prolific users of the system.  The uptake in 2017 looks like we’ll overtake our previous annual data volumes in the first three months of the year!  Meanwhile, Tracey has been handling any of the support requests really well under our new support processes, put in place by James.

We’re also now planning to work with the Departmental staff to roll the system out to a range of additional Local Governments, and I did a quick trip back to Victoria a few weeks ago to get that set up.  In addition, in the coming months we’re going to add in our first treatment system components for the Medical Entomology module, as the Victorian department invests further in the system to get additional functionality implemented.  We’ll post more blogs on that, and a few other directions that we’re moving in with the Atlas, in due course.

In the meantime, we’ll be working hard on delivering additional functionality through the Victorian investments, loading additional historical data into the system, and we’ll be heading back to Victoria to do some more training and rollouts.  In the meantime, keep an eye out for us via our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn pages, or drop me an email.

Piers

The post Expanding the Atlas to Victoria appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Over time, Gaia Resources has been involved in a wide variety of field data collection projects with different clients from a wide range of client bases, so I think we’re pretty well suited to be able to comment on this area.  The talk I gave is embedded below, and it might not be quite what you were expecting.

I struggled with this talk, because as my bio stated, I am a technology junkie.  While I firmly believe that mobile data capture can help fauna surveys, this will require investment from the survey practitioners to develop tools that are tailored to the different workflows that they use (and in this climate, sometimes that’s hard to justify).  This is also plagued by the expectation that we see a lot – that technology is a “magic bullet”, and this isn’t the case.

The workshop wasn’t just about technology, though.  We had talks from the regulators, from practitioners and from solution providers like ourselves; there were also some interactive elements like workshops on survey methodologies for threatened species.  For me the highlights included some direction from the Office of the Environmental Protection Authority, an update on the Western Australian Biodiversity Science Institute and the innovative technology talks on thermal cameras, acoustics and drones (spot the technology junkie again?).  It was also great to talk to a range of practitioners around our support for Quantum GIS (including our training courses, one of which is coming up soon – stay tuned), and other work that was relevant.  And, I had a very pleasant trip back down memory lane along the way.

Back in the day, I was once employed to do field surveys myself.  I am by no means an expert in anything but as a generalist I have an interest in a lot (as a few of my Facebook friends will have seen from my latest forays into fungi identification).  But I was taught some very robust techniques and what to consider in terms of survey from some very experienced biologists from Biota and the Western Australian Museum.  Along the way I learned a lot about survey techniques and what to consider – except how bad that yellow hat was.

Yep, that’s a younger version of me, disappearing into a rock pile in the Pilbara in the “good old days”

Anyway, back to technology -I use a custom mobile app that we built in-house for my own bird surveys, and I love using it.  It has been tailored for my own use; for example, the autocomplete field for species names means that my data entry is about as fast as I think you can make it on a mobile device.  The fields on the form are arranged in such a way that I can enter the name, number if they are transient (e.g. flying overhead – these are things that might not be actually using the habitat I am surveying) and then hit “Save and Continue”.  The forms take care of the time, date, location (to a defined accuracy) all automatically, and I end up with  very detailed point dataset of all of my sightings.  In addition, I flick out of the recording form regularly to view the species accumulation curves I’m getting to see if I’m starting to tail off on the curve or if I still have a way to go (something you inherently know, but this does help to make you think about it).

 Example screenshots from the internal app I use for birding

I haven’t been birding for a while now, so when I’m in this “rusty” state for field identifications, the time it takes me for data entry is a small fraction of the time I spend searching and trying to identify those Small Brown Jobs (SBJs) or that faint call I just heard.  So for me, this is a robust data entry mechanism that can keep up with me – but I’ll readily admit I can easily get out-data-entered by someone who can immediately do their identifications who is armed with a trusty notebook and pencil.  But I know I can create a species list or site map from all my digital data much quicker than they can (and usually when Dad and I go for a survey, we check those out in the car or cafe afterwards)! The back end system that you use with your field data collection can really add to the success of the field work.

This experience means that at Gaia Resources we look at the problems that clients bring to us and we look at how we can holistically help them solve their problems with technology – and sometimes the best thing we can do is to tell them to wait, or that we don’t have the magic bullet that they are looking for.  However, I’m pretty sure in the near future we’ll be rolling our new solutions for the environmental consulting industry, based off a range of things that James and I saw at the workshop.

If you want to have a chat about some of the tools that I mentioned in my talk for field data capture, or how we can help your organisation with tools like QGIS, then feel free to call (08 92277309), email me or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Fauna Surveys and Technology appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Kangaroo Island / Victor Harbor Dolphin Watch is a volunteer community project in partnership with Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), that gathers information on the population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) and common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) found around the peninsulas of South Australia. This longitudinal project was developed by Tony and Phyll Bartram in conjunction with Dr Mike Bossley AM of WDC.

The group have been recording data for some time, and recently sent through a data file containing all of their historical sightings. Tracey and I have just added all this archival data into the Citizen Science hub, using the bulk loading tools, to present a more complete picture of the diversity around their coastal waters.  You can interact with their data on the new Citizen Science Hub project page (or click on the image below).

A snapshot of observations in the Kangaroo Island and Victor Harbor area

For current and ongoing records, the team at Kangaroo Island utilises the existing Coastal Walkabout mobile app to capture a range of mostly marine mammal observations in their region of South Australia. This utilises the BDRS repository we run under the Hub – from which their volunteer submissions can be managed and visualised.  They’ve also been supporters of the Coastal Walkabout app for a long time – going as far as to promote it around their area with large signs and support from local businesses, like the Sealink Ferry.

Coastal Walkabout signage on the Sealink Ferry (image courtesy Phyll Bartram)

For more information on our Citizen Science Hub, or how we can assist you in setting up your own project, feel free to call me (+61 8 9227 7309), drop me an email, or start a conversation on Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter with us.

Alex

The post Kangaroo Island / Victor Harbour Dolphin Watch appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Gaia Resources were one of the gold sponsors for the conference, and we also pitched in to help run the event – Alex prepared and supported two posters (one on our new Citizen Science Hub, and another on the BDRS), while I presented a talk (embedded below, or available on Slideshare), ran the second workshop and helped run one of the Saturday workshops on technology usability.  It was a very busy conference for us, because in amongst that we also spoke to heaps of clients, collaborators, and a lot of new and energetic faces.

My talk on factors for success in citizen science

For me, the highlight of the first day was the success of workshop two, on data collection and management. My co-chairs (John la Salle and Luigi Ceccaroni) had given me free reign, so I took a risk with the format.  It totally paid off with the passion and enthusiasm that the delegates brought to the fore. The five talks I had selected to open the session were all well delivered and really gave the delegates the overview I was hoping for – why we need to collect data, the emergence of a project based data standard, two large projects (one is spatial extent and data, the other in time), and finally a reminder that people want to use (and cite) the data.  After a Question and Answer session, I took a deep breath and jumped.

The Q&A Session in Workshop Two

In the second hour of the workshop my aim was to engage the audience to explain the challenges and opportunities that were to be found in data collection and management, using the DataOne data life cycle model to pick out the “Collect”, “Preserve” and “Integrate” steps. After a brief explanation, I asked a lecture theatre of 210 people to work with their neighbours to come up with three challenges and opportunities for each. After 15 minutes or so of roaming the room with my co-chairs, I brought up a document and started to type… and type… and type… I type pretty fast, but I was hard pressed to keep up with the shouts coming from the audience.

Trying to keep up with the influx of ideas in Workshop Two

The full list of all the answers is here, but I’ve also taken that and Wordled it below… one for challenges and one for opportunities.

Challenges

Opportunities

It’s pretty interesting just to look at these two Wordles, especially given the great big commonality of data (which was so often cited, Wordle included it twice in each) – but that’s worthy of something a bit more than just this overview.  I’m working on how to write this up into some sort of a report as well, so stay tuned for that.

I don’t think I’ve been happier to see a risk pay off and I’m working on both a report on this workshop, and a paper around these challenges and opportunities to submit to the nascent Journal of Citizen Science, something Alex and I found out more about after the Saturday sessions in an international meeting.  That meeting was another highlight, which I’ll get to in a second. Anyway, workshop two went better than I expected,  and the importance of BBQs in citizen science was finally recognised.

Day Two saw us being delegates once again, and there were quite a few highlights here – the vote to go ahead with the incorporation of the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA, pronounced “axe-ah” it seems), the election of the management committee and the understanding that ACSA has funding ready to start working on initiatives was a great start to the day. It got better as we heard from various speakers around their projects and other areas – there was much inspiration to be found throughout the day (helped by the doughnut balls at afternoon tea).

The final day I attended all four of the workshops. Although they were a bit ragged, they had plenty of enthusiasm. I helped Paul Flemons run the technology usability workshop by firstly giving a talk about the software engineering process (showing the difference between the waterfall and agile methodologies), with a focus on what you need to do as clients (not “users”).  Then Paul had a prepared exercise ready to go, where delegates broke up into groups, chose a use case, and prepared a list of requirements, designed the workflow for their use case, and even got to sketching out a rough design for the app (thanks to a handy whiteboard!)

Our whiteboard (seriously, I think I have an addiction to whiteboards)

This was a new experience for many of the people in the group I was with, but they went along with the process, and at the end all four groups came back to present their elevator pitch (and suddenly I found myself being an impromptu mime in an elevator). This was quite fun, and a good way to end this session.  You now also have the origins of the BBQ, doughnuts, and elevator hashtags you will have seen in the Twitter feed…

After these four workshops, the new ACSA management committee had invited the international delegates and a few of us with experience in international projects (Paul Flemons as the Oceania representative of TDWG, and Alex and I for our past experiences with TDWG and OGC) to discuss potential collaboration,  the new Journal of Citizen Science, and interoperability and collaboration generally between ACSA, and their European and American counterpart organisations. It was a pretty productive discussion, in that we might have some more Australians on the editorial board, plans for an interoperability working group, and a few other initiatives that the new ACSA management committee will be working on.

It’s pretty hard to sum up the conference in a blog post as to all the things we learned… so in the end I didn’t try.  I think I can speak for Alex by saying that the conference was one of the best experiences we’ve had and it was exhausting.  We had some time on Sunday to decompress and write out our thoughts before coming home.  I think we wrote out about three pages of bullet points to work with, and I think we’re going to be working on this for a while to come… and yet, I can’t wait for the next one.

Piers

Leave me a comment below, or comment on Facebook or Twitter.

The post Australian Citizen Science Association Conference appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We’ve been supporting the ACSA since inception here by providing free hosting for the ACSA web site, and I’ve been involved in the first workshop they held in Brisbane (see our blog for details of that past workshop).  We’ve also been involved in the setting up of the organisation, and this conference will be a great start to the new Association, and we’re looking forward to supporting it into the future, as well.

At the conference, Alex and I will be giving three presentations – two posters and a paper – and one of the main ones we will be focusing on is the launch of our new Citizen Science Hub, now live at http://citizensciencehub.archive.gaiaresources.com.au/ (or http://tinyurl.com/citscihub if you prefer something shorter).

The aim of this hub is to provide a place to celebrate our citizen science projects and to provide more ways for the community to engage with scientists, and vice versa.  Our role here is as an enabler; where we provide the solutions to help this engagement happen – be they mobile apps, the Biological Data Recording System (BDRS), WordPress plugins, training, hosting, ongoing support or program design assistance.

The new Citizen Science Hub website has been set up to help connect participants with projects, such as the ones we support, including:

• Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre,
• Coastal Walkabout,
• Discovery Circle,
• Dolphin Watch,
• Marri Canker, and
• Prawn Watch.

We’re also working on a few other projects at the moment, which will appear and be added to in the future.

We run a range of different internal citizen science projects, which we’ve also added to the Hub site.  When we add these, it increases the volume of data quite considerable (looking at my own bird records, there’s a fair bit of time already invested there across the 17,000+ records I’ve logged!).

The records in the hub – click on the image to go to the Participate page to investigate

We also aim to connect up the scientists and project proponents with the communities, and with the technologies to help this happen.  We remain an independent solution provider so that we can put together the best tools for the projects at hand, and are looking at a range of existing and emerging technologies across the globe to better serve our clients.  Our role as an enabler means we sit between the citizens and the scientists, and make sure the technology solutions meet the needs of both.

Importantly, we’ve aimed to keep the data free and open for people to use.  Our projects have been more than happy to share data between them, and to contribute to this larger pool of data.  Once we get the Atlas of Living Australia to harvest this data, it will be sent on to that repository, and from there to the international community including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Over the course of the next three days at the ACSA Conference, Alex and I will be presenting, running workshops, posting our thoughts all across social media (for once, I might actually be using my Twitter account!), and generally having a ball meeting with everyone across the citizen science space.

Stay tuned for more announcements regarding the Hub and our work in this area.

Piers

Leave a comment below, or drop in on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn sites.

The post Gaia Resources Citizen Science Hub appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Alex in training mode (photo courtesy Swan River Trust)

Here are a few common questions answered or explained.

Where do I get it?
You can get the Dolphin Watch app for free from the iTunes or Google Play stores by clicking on either of the buttons below.

I can’t use the Dolphin Watch button!
In order to undertake a time-based dolphin watch track, it is necessary to register as a River Guardian, complete the training, receive a Dolphin Watch ID, and enter it into the app. Details about becoming a River Guardian are available on the River Guardians web site.  However, ad hoc sightings of dolphins can be made as soon as you download the app.

How do I record dolphin sightings?
There are two independent ways of observing and recording dolphins in the app – ad hoc sightings and zone-based observations over a time period.

The ‘Record a Dolphin’ button (top left in the app) is for ad hoc sightings – a simple way of recording a dolphin observation with a geocode, date and time with the option of submitting a photo or short video and some basic general information.

The ‘Dolphin Watch’ button (top right) tracks your observations over a period of time, such as a stroll by the river, and records more detailed observations at the end of the period into a ‘zone summary’ – even if you haven’t observed any dolphins. The Swan and Canning rivers are divided into 33 zones and a zone summary aggregates zero or more sightings for that observation period in that particular zone.

What if I don’t see any dolphins?
Recording that you didn’t see any sightings of a dolphin is very important data!  Absence data greatly assists ecologists in more accurately modelling dolphin distributions and correlating habitat preferences with specific behaviours.

How do I send my records to you?
The ‘Review and Upload’ button (bottom left) shows you a map of the individual observations you have made, initially with a small red dolphin icon. Selecting one of these icons shows a small box saying ‘Bottlenose Dolphin’ which, when clicked on, provides the record data for you to review and correct if required. You can even add an image to a record if you hadn’t had a chance to originally.

Once you are happy that all your records are correct and ready to upload, you can click on the button below the map ‘Upload records’, which sends the data via the internet to the Biological Data Recording System (BDRS) server where all records are aggregated.  Optionally, you can use the slider below the button to keep or delete the records from your phone, but this will only happen after the data is successfully uploaded to the BDRS.

When’s the next training?
The next Dolphin Watch training session is being held on Wednesday, 26 August 2015 6:00pm to 8:30pm.

How do I get involved in Dolphin Watch?
More information about becoming a Dolphin Watcher and attending training sessions can be found on the River Guardians web site.

For more information on the program please get in touch with us directly, via our Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin pages, or leave us a comment below!

The post Dolphin Watch Training appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Prawn Watch app for Apple and Android mobile devices was developed by Gaia Resources with guidance from the River Guardians program. It allows the prawning community to simply record and upload catch data to a River Guardians database. This information will then be assessed by the researchers and the results will contribute to the long-term sustainable conservation aims of the project.

Screenshots from the Mobile app

The new app complements the research program – which includes culturing the Western School Prawn for release and understanding the factors limiting recruitment – and encourages community engagement through data collection, information sharing and the promotion of river friendly activities and sustainable fishing practices.

At the launch of the Prawn Watch app in January 2015 WA Fisheries Minister Ken Baston said Prawn Watch was an exciting citizen science project linked to the Western School Prawn restocking program which was focused on restocking the Swan and Canning rivers with prawns, and the launch was accompanied by a media release – and even a Channel 9 news article which featured our Director, Piers Higgs.

The Channel 9 news article about the Prawn Watch launch

The app has already been used to record data this season, and you can see a map of the reports for this season live via the Coastal Walkabout web site at this link.

Some updates for the Prawn Watch app and web site are being finalised to add more functionality to the site and make it even easier to record information about the Prawns in the Swan and Canning Rivers.

For more information, feel free to contact me via email, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.

Alex

The post Citizen Science and Prawns appeared first on Gaia Resources.

A primary goal of the conference was to give attention to developing or refining criteria for the identification of globally important marine mammal areas (IMMA’s) and to address the challenges and strategies of managing very large and very small marine mammal protected areas.

I attended four sessions/workshops:

• Public Engagement: Expanding Constituencies of Support by Reaching Wider Audiences
• Wildlife Interpretation and Education: connecting with marine mammals and their habitats
• Protecting Spinner Dolphin Resting Areas
• Citizen Science and Important Marine Mammal Areas

It was the last which was the primary impetus for attending as Coastal Walkabout collaborator Professor Lars Bedj3r from Murdoch Universities Cetacean Research Institute was presenting the latest analyses of citizen science engagement and experience (a paper which Piers is a co-author on).

Lars presenting at ICMMPA3

The case study ‘Is Citizen Science effective in informing candidate IMMA’s?’ compared 6 months of dolphin observations in the Swan-Canning River Park (SCRP) from both traditional (TS) and citizen science (CS) sources. The CS data was sourced from the Dolphin Watch initiative while the TS data came from a small team of researchers at Murdoch Uni.

Comparative data captured between March – August 2014 included:

• TS provided 67 hours of observational effort compared with 1342 hours from CS
• TS observed 259 dolphins while CS saw 1150 dolphins
• TS was confined to on-water observations over 12/33 zones in the River Park while CS covered 32/33 zones

Initial results from the case study suggest that:

• TS provides a deeper level of scientific observations than CS
• CS provides a greater quantity of observations both in terms of effort and spatial distribution
• CS can inform on cIMMA’s but requires continuous and repeated training and a high level of engagement

The authors concluded that CS can make scientific, conservation and educational contributions to research in partnership with specialist scientists.

There were also a number of existing users of the Coastal Walkabout app (get it on iTunes, Google Play) in attendance and a good deal of interest from attendees in the application of smartphone apps to enhance their citizen science initiatives around the country and extending into the Pacific.

Contact me directly if you want to know more, via email, or leave a comment below.

Alex

The post Marine Mammals, Apps, and Citizen Science appeared first on Gaia Resources.

It was a beautiful day in Brisbane

Gaia Resources has been supporting the CSNA setup by providing free hosting for the website www.citizenscience.org.au and also by implementing the email list server.  We have done this because citizen science has been – and continues to be – an important part of our work, and learning how to better help run citizen science projects and keeping up to date with the movements in this area is important.

The purpose of this workshop was to look at how the CSNA should be set up, and I am very hopeful that a clear path will emerge based on what I saw from the audio booth during the day (I was put to work running the presentations and audio).  What also emerged from the day is just how much overlap and replication of work there is in this space.

I think that this is because we are in the early stages of the citizen science “industry” in Australia, and we’re in that shakeup phase, like the introduction area of a product life cycle:

The Product Life Cycle

At the moment, citizen science is still an introductory market, and I think we’ll see the shakeout of the various citizen science products and services over time.  Personally, I think that one important thing that everyone needs to consider in this early stage – developers, service providers, project managers and citizens – is sustainability.  More on that later…

There are a couple of things that I was thinking about in the workshop that I didn’t get to talk about in the panel session I was in, nor comment from the booth, but I managed to post it via a tweet:

So here’s an explanation of that in more than 140 characters:

1. Embrace diversity

Every citizen science project has different aims and groups that use it, so you need to be able to embrace that.  There was some discussion about standardising methodologies across projects, and I think that is a bad idea.  You need to embrace this diversity, let the methods shake out, and instead document the methods really well so that when we share data you can compare apples with apples.

2. Collaborate to succeed

Citizen science projects need to talk to each other, learn from mistakes and share infrastructure.  Importantly, you need to share volunteers and make it easy for them to work with all of our groups.  There is a lot of competition at the moment in the citizen science space, because…

3. Collaboration is hard

This is one area that is really hitting home to me lately.  I would be as bold as to say that collaboration hasn’t happened often in citizen science for a while and I still saw a lot of jostling for position to ‘own’ citizen science and groups wanting to make their projects the World Dominating Citizen Science project.  It seems that there is, however, some good signs with groups starting to talk and collaborate.

So there is a little more explanation of my tweet, and there’s a good example of what I mean in our Coastal Walkabout project.

Coastal Walkabout embraces diversity with the concepts of projects.  We are currently running two production projects, the Coastal Walkabout project itself and the Swan River Trust Dolphin Watch project, with the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre ready to launch in a few weeks.  There are a range of additional international projects wanting to join up as well!

Each project in the Coastal Walkabout projects embraces diversity by:

• Providing the ability to configure the apps and back end to suit the needs of the project – with us recommending that all observational data use some of the basic attributes in the Darwin Core standard to ensure interoperability,
• A separate ‘survey’ in the underlying BDRS system that separates their data, and provides the back end flexibility to manage their own attributes, and
• A simple project page on the Coastal Walkabout web site so that they can see their data in a live map (like the Coastal Walkabout data page and the Dolphin Watch data map)

You can download the Coastal Walkabout (iPhone and Android) and DolphinWatch (iPhone and Android) apps now

The Coastal Walkabout project also collaborates in a few areas;

• All the different projects run on the same infrastructure – so hosting is centralised and costs are shared between projects,
• Everyone signing up for one Coastal Walkabout project can access all of the others with the same login details,
• Allowing anyone to sign up means that the data can be freely downloaded by any interested party, and
• Using Darwin Core style attributes means that the data can be readily mobilised to other systems, groups or even countries.

And of course, collaboration is hard, but by starting with a project that aims to develop into a ‘hub’ where groups can work together, this has made our life a lot easier.

But what does this actually mean in terms of sustainability, the issue I raised at the start of this blog?

The BDRS is an open source package, with the source code available on Google Code.  This has enabled projects like the 2012 Koala Count to be run by groups like the NSW Parks Association, who took the code and reworked it themselves with their own developer.  Dr. Gráinne Cleary and her team have done a great job on using the BDRS to do this – and I managed to meet Gráinne at the CSNA workshop for the first time to see how they did it.

This proves that the BDRS has a future that is sustainable.  There are regular additions to it, we continue to use it in a range of projects and we have recently been looking at the BDRS road maps to look at its future.  The BDRS remains a solid part of our stable of products and we use it for a range of projects both internally and commercially, and we’re actively looking at a few of the issues we – and our clients – have identified in it.  More on that in another blog, I think!

The future for Coastal Walkabout – and for citizen science projects in general – looks bright.  For us, there will be a third project coming on line from the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre in the next few weeks.  For any citizen science project in Australia, I expect the CSNA to be formed, to be independent of any one organisation, and to be a voice for best practice, advice and will enable collaboration between groups.

I’m really looking forward to seeing where the next few years takes us in this space.

Piers

P.S. Stay tuned for a second blog this week about the Tipping Point Conference!

Leave me a comment below, start a conversation on the Gaia Resources Facebook page, or get in touch with me via Twitter.

The post Citizen Science Network Australia appeared first on Gaia Resources.

One hat I wore was my Gaia Resources hat, where I gave a quick talk at the end of the night about how to use the Dolphin Watch app we produced a while back (as outlined here).  It was only a very brief introduction to the apps – as necessitated by a 5 minute slot at 8:20pm!

The other hat was given to me on the night, and it is a Dolphin Watch hat.  I’ve signed the forms and gone through the awareness training, so I’m now accredited as a volunteer.  Over the next few days, I, along with the other volunteers, will get our welcome emails and information so that we can start to officially undertake surveys around the Swan River.

We often deliver services to citizen science groups through Gaia Resources, but this is a good opportunity for me to be on the other side of the table.  So once I get the introductory material I will be heading out to do some surveys around the Swan River looking for the resident Tursiops aduncus dolphins.

The curved screen at the Planetarium is a bit of a challenge (photo courtesy Alex Chapman)

One of the reasons I decided to volunteer to the project is to be involved in an exemplary citizen science program from both sides.  The way that the team at the Swan River Trust run this project is just fantastic, the small team involved do an amazing job of engaging with volunteers and it’s hard not to want to be part of that culture and project – even if they do drag you on-stage to role-play a baby dolphin, then make you do stair climbing to deliver prizes to the volunteers.

Find out more about the Dolphin Watch program at http://www.riverguardians.com/projects/dolphin-watch/.

Piers

Leave a comment below, or start a conversation with us on the Gaia Resources Facebook page, or via my own or the Gaia Resources Twitter accounts.

The post The other side of citizen science appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Coastal Walkabout version 1.2 Apps are just hitting the Android Play and iTunes stores at the moment.

This new release includes some changes that have been made to the performance of the App, but the main change that people will see with the new version of the App is the social media component.

This new functionality allows for people to publicise that they have added sightings to Coastal Walkabout through either their own Facebook or Twitter accounts.  This doesn’t publish the details of the upload, but provides a link back to the main data screens on the Coastal Walkabout web page.

This is important for the project as this sort of publicity will attract more people to the project.  Of course, you can press the “Done” button and not share it on Facebook or Twitter, it’s totally at the discretion of each person using the App.

On both iOS and Android versions, you must have the official Facebook or Twitter app installed and you must be logged into these apps.  The Coastal Walkabout App will give you directions if your phone is not correctly set up already.

We can also provide some details of the new Twitter Harvester that runs silently in the back of the Coastal Walkabout infrastructure.  This means that Coastal Walkabout now watches Twitter for posts about species sightings!

To contribute a sighting via Twitter, all you need to do is to publish a tweet that includes:

1. A species name, scientific or common name that exists in the coastal walkabout survey. The name has to be a match with the species we have included in the project!
2. A set of coordinates for the location (which you would normally turn on within your mobile twitter App) OR a ‘place’ e.g. Tokyo, Japan, which would only be possible via the Twitter web browser interface.
3. Most importantly, the #coastalwalkabout hashtag.

These tweets are collected every hour and stored within a specific area in the Coastal Walkabout infrastructure, but they also become available to be seen on the main map of all of the sightings at http://coastalwalkabout.archive.gaiaresources.com.au/wordpress/data/.

We are seeing a lot of interest in Coastal Walkabout from people all around the world, and we’re seeing sightings starting to come in all around Australia, and even some sightings from other parts of the world!

Piers

Leave me a comment below, or start a conversation on Twitter or Facebook.

The post Coastal Walkabout 1.2 out! appeared first on Gaia Resources.