I had that opportunity recently when our partners at Outline Global (who capture high resolution aerial imagery for the Northern Territory Government) called me up and asked if I could wander around the Darwin region looking for Ground Control Points (GCPs) that had been surveyed in 2019, and give them a bit of a zhuzh… a bit of a refresh…  a lick of new paint… a new lease on life as it were.

I jumped at the chance to get outside and do some ‘field work.’ Ok, it’s a far cry from my days as a geologist stepping off helicopters onto remote mountain ridges… but hey when you spend the majority of your time tapping a keyboard and clicking a mouse, this is an opportunity with a lot of advantages. Firstly, there’s a lot of the Darwin region I had not seen. Then there’s the sunshine and beautiful conditions of the Dry season, the chance to use some free tracking apps… it was a bit like an easy but widely distributed Geocaching excursion.

What are GCPs I hear you ask? These are temporary survey markers that are obvious control points visible from a plane capturing aerial imagery. The plane criss-crosses on a structured flight plan, so that the resulting imagery strips have significant overlap and can be used for post-processing. Analysts use software to find the GCPs in overlapping images to ‘register’ the imagery and create an orthorectified mosaic. To go through this process with a high level of accuracy you either need to re-use old GCPs with known surveyed coordinates, or conduct a new survey.

You see, these dilapidated white markers were in need of some TLC. Some were little more than a bunch of painted white rocks assembled in a cross and referenced in the previous survey report, and it is not surprising that in the parks and public places they were placed two years back, that someone thought: ‘Well, that is a collection of rocks that is just begging to be kicked.’

An example of a GCP located out at Lee Point. On arrival the marker and cross (left) were barely recognisable. The refreshed GCP (right) will now be visible from the aerial imagery. (right)

To be fair, it is not surprising in that time that these mysterious assemblages would have experienced both human and natural wear and tear, such as blustering winds, monsoonal rains, people with anarchistic tendencies.

So here I come smiling away with my set of 23 waypoints loaded up onto an free and open-source app called OpenGPXTracker and a can of white spray paint. I also brought my laptop along for the ride with a QGIS project with the waypoints and OpenStreetMaps. This was my regional view to help me plan my route,  but I also had the original survey report on the laptop as a reference. I also made sure to bring along plenty of water and a first aid kit.

Across two days, I navigated to the coordinate positions, and followed a bit of a process at each destination:

• wander around with my phone until I stood on the waypoint location
• locate the white GCP marker (sometimes very obvious, other times pretty damn difficult)
• take a “before” photograph
• brush off the soil vegetation
• spray paint the original area
• take an “after” photograph and notes
• hop back in the vehicle

As the tracklog map below hints at, there was a fair bit driving, a number of little dead-ends where the map was a bit ambitious about what constituted a road. There was one that turned out to be a 10km bush track along a fenceline that connected two sealed country roads. Initially happy to find the short-cut, I was soon glad to have brought the 4WD so I could avoid getting bogged in the sandy ruts on that track.

It’s a dragon! Ground Control Points and routes travelled across the Darwin and Humpty Doo region. Day 1 (blue) and day 2 (orange) are shown.

I got to see parts of Darwin you don’t often drive to unless you have a work responsibility to be there, or are a keen fisherman. Apart from the mundane manhole cover on the side of the road, there were termite mounds and historical sites. For instance, Channel Island was a bit of a drive but was an interesting spot with its power station, jetty and historical uses as a quarantine hospital and leprosarium dating back to the early 1900’s. The GCP there by the way was a damaged sign that I think someone must have backed into with their boat!

Channel Island Bridge looking back at jetty and transmission towers (left), Ground Control Point at Channel Island (right),

So now you are up to speed with my field work out of the Darwin office of Gaia Resources! Hope you found that somewhat amusing, but if you’d like to learn more about the imagery being captured, or other projects we get involved in the Top End please feel free to contact me or start up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post Spicing up work life with a bit of field work appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Farmers like Mark Desaliy can use the app to monitor fires near their stations.

Our initial release of the North Australia and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) app for iOS and Android back in February brings the most used fire information resource for land managers in Australia to your phone, allowing you to keep a constant eye on bushfire threats. You can view maps of satellite generated fire activity (hotspots) and burnt areas (fire scars) provided by the NAFI service. There’s a good summary back in March from Rohan Fisher on ABC Radio – Kimberley.

At a regional scale like this area in northern NT and WA, the NAFI app represents real-time hotspots through a heat map clustering algorithm.

Just to recap on how the app works behind the scenes to provide you with real-time fire information:

• The hotspot locations are updated several times a day and the fire scars are updated up to once or twice a week depending on fire conditions.
• The fire scars are produced by the NAFI Service and the hotspots are sourced from Landgate WA and Geoscience Australia.
• Base maps for imagery and topography can be downloaded for offline use in your region of interest, and then used for when you go outside of mobile data range.
• Burnt area mapping covers the Australian Savannas and rangelands that comprise around 70% of Australia, but does not cover NSW, VIC or the heavily populated regions of QLD, WA and SA.

So how popular is the NAFI app – well we can monitor a number of analytics using iOS AppStoreConnect and Google Play console, or the Firebase dashboard. These are configurable dashboards that can tell us things like how many installations occurred by day or week, how many are actively used, and filtered by operating system or device type. As of today, the iOS app has been downloaded 288 times since it’s initial release, and the Android version 142 times.

AppStoreConnect dashboard for the iOS NAFI app provides statistics of installations by week since the mid-February release.
Google Play Console shows the increase in installations of the Android NAFI app over time since the mid-February release.

We expect installations to continue upwards in the month of May and beyond, as more people on the ground become aware of the benefits and utility of the app. There are two phases of bushfire related activity  where the app can be useful, associated with the early Dry season burn programs and carbon (emission reduction) projects, and the late Dry season bushfire response.

The statistics are anonymised so we are not tracking personal information, but what the out-of-the-box analytics does help us to understand are the trends, and – along with ratings and word of mouth – we get a bit more insight into how people are reacting to the app. This can then feed into our strategy with clients on helping them target marketing campaigns and prioritise enhancements. We also utilise Firebase Crashlytics as a way of logging the details of any crashes and error messages received, and this really helps us get quickly to the root cause of a technical issue a particular user is experiencing.

Please be aware if you are using the app:

• Hotspot location on any map may only be accurate to within 1.5 km
• The hotspot symbol on the maps does not indicate the size of the fire
• Some fires may be small, brief, or obscured by smoke or cloud and go undetected
• Satellites detect other heat sources such as smokestacks

For more information visit: https://savannafiremapping.com/nafi-mobile-app/

If you would like to know more about our projects with the NAFI team, or want to strike up a conversation by sending me an email or getting in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post The NAFI app is changing the way work is planned in the field appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The 2019 Territory NRM Conference featured a number of presentations like this one in the Darwin Convention Centre and the nearby CDU Waterfront campus (Source: Territory NRM)

In this year’s conference, the NAFI team will facilitate a workshop to look at recent developments in some of the important tools that land managers depend on for monitoring fires across 70% of Australia. The workshop will be demonstrating some of the latest tools leveraging NAFI for accessing and analysing fire information for NRM support. Part of that will be on their new Plugin for our favourite QGIS software (which we have blogged about previously), and our current project to develop a NAFI mobile app for Android and iOS devices. Also on the agenda will be the latest developments in providing sophisticated fire history analysis information through the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Metrics (SMERF) interface.

The NAFI QGIS plugin was released earlier this year, providing an easy to use interface to access fire information data products.

Those attending will get to see a preview of our “test” app development to date, and we’ll have a few devices on hand so they can play with a test version. We’ll talk about the future vision and invite participants to provide feedback on how they see the app being used in the field. These sorts of sessions are gold for us in the development space, because we can really get a sense of where the high value functionality lies. Obviously the true power behind the app is the NAFI data products, but we are really excited about  what this means for those who use them. So as not to give everything away, we’ll blog after the event to provide a recap.

So if you are heading along to the Territory NRM conference, tap elbows with Chris and feel free to strike up a conversation. Or get in touch online through on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

The post Preview of the Territory NRM Conference 2020 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

Debbie Saunders demonstrating the Wildlife Drones method

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex

The post Drones for Wildlife appeared first on Gaia Resources.

These projects cover a wide range of GIS tasks our team have been involved in, including data management, basic and complex processing, database creation, GIS strategy, spatial plugin development and yes, making maps!

We’ve been helping the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) in support of a few important initiatives, including:

• The Region Estuaries Initiative (REI) is a “program to improve the health of six estuaries in the South West.” Our objective here was to create a map of the regional catchment group boundaries for estuaries alongside other data collated from the catchment groups.
• We provided quality control resources for the Department’s Healthy Rivers program, which was setup to “collect and interpret data on rivers and their catchments, and use the knowledge gained to support development of strategies to best protect the environment.” Through this comes the creation of the River Reaches spatial layer shown below. With well over 50 areas mapped quality control using a documented process becomes a major part of ensuring consistency and a high level of quality. This essentially requires the use of numerous GIS processes ranging from automated geometry checks to manual spot checks on attributes and linework.

Gaia Resources have had a great partner in Robin Connolly from Hydrologia, who has been sending through a number of small projects involving data processing tasks and map production for their surface water hydrology reports. This work often covers aspects of stormwater management, flood risk and environmental impact assessment around mine sites and other infrastructure. Our role as his extended GIS team is to source data and work through how best to represent options and hydrological modelling results with numerous other themes for each area. For more information have a look at our projects summary.

We had the opportunity recently to do a deep dive into the GIS system at Garnet Mining Australia (GMA) and help them to set up a best practice spatial environment for their core business workflows. This started with our standard GIS health check followed by the migration of data to a cloud-hosted database. We helped GMA to design file and folder naming conventions, and built up a guideline and set of procedures to help them easily manage their spatial data into the future.

This will create a more seamless experience for their workflows by using QGIS desktop GIS software to discover and load the most up-to-date information. Next up we will provide QGIS refresher training to GMA staff and a comprehensive handover of their new setup. In these difficult times with COVID-19 restrictions affecting businesses everywhere, we are looking at maintaining social distancing with a remote training session and combining classroom style training with our free online video tutorials.

Our software developers even got in on the act with GIS software this year when we worked with the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC) to rebuild their QGIS plug-in for layer discovery and automated map production. Have a look at our previous blog about that project.

A special mention should also be given to our GIS analysts’ work on the recently released Retromaps website, where we carefully stitched together over 2000 georeferenced sewerage scheme plans from past decades. That website has been a big hit for the public to check out building outlines and historical mapping from their own neighbourhoods, and our blog from last week provides more detail on the work involved.

If you’d like to know more about GIS and our work in this space, please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via jake.geddes@gaiaresources.com.au.

Jake

The post All things Spatial! 🌏 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

As part of the project, the SROWA digitised and georeferenced 2,149 historical sewerage plans for the Perth area, thanks to a whole range of volunteers.  These resulting georeferenced images are pretty large – around the 400MB mark each – and provide an unparalleled, highly accurate and high resolution snapshot of the Perth metropolitan area, from dates ranging from 1910 through to 1964.

There were a number of challenges associated with making these maps available in a way that is performant, but also clean and consistent to provide an exceptional experience for anyone using the site.

The Challenge

We needed to make sure that our solution had the following characteristics:

• Simple and easy to use for SROWA, their clients, and the general public,
• It has the basic map tools to navigate easily and efficiently, including search capabilities,
• It will show the plans displayed “in the real world” (i.e. on a mapping interface), and
• The mapping interface should also show current satellite imagery.

In addition to these basic requirements, we also wanted to make sure that the solution:

• Delivered the plans in way that is most useful to as wide an audience as possible,
• Will be expandable to be able to add in other map series if they become available,
• Represents exceptional value for money in both the creation of the system and the ongoing maintenance of the system for SROWA, and
• Works with the existing investments that the SROWA have put into their internal systems.

No small challenge, and there were a couple of problems to deal with along the way…

The Problems

The first problem was reducing 2,149 large images (400MB) without losing the high resolution quality.  So, we used some pretty handy spatial software tools and developed a bunch of scripts to help deal with the volume of images and reduce the size (on average) to around 3 – 4% of the original image – with minimal loss of resolution.  We also put the site online using infrastructure from Amazon Web Services – which means we can scale it up really easily if the demand requires it (and in the meantime, it’s great value for money!).

The second problem, and the most time sapping task, was to deal with the “overlap” between the maps.  Each of the raw original plans overlaps the ones near to it (see figure below), so we needed to get around this to create a seamless mapping layer.

The maps when overlaid on each other block out parts of the map, so with our solution we had to remove these to make them more useful as a seamless layer.

We did this by digitising the “real world” boundaries of the maps (where there were actual features to see) and after some final checks and quality control we could now start stitching everything together.  Creating a seamless layer involved multiple spatial scripts and more free and open source spatial tools.  After a run through of the scripts, we had a nicely tiled map layer, all ready for use on the web.

But of course, you still need to be able to download the individual map tiles so that you can see all the important marginalia on the sides of them (like the date of the map) so we also were able to allow the maps to be individually downloaded from within the site itself.

Putting it together

The resultant Retromaps website was designed and developed to cope with the problems we had identified and delivered on the challenges we had set ourselves (and SROWA set us).  The resultant web site has seen a lot of people already signing up – there were over 7,000 people signing up on the first Saturday it was out, thanks to the launch being shared across a whole range of sites on social media.

An example of the sorts of detail and maps that you can see within the site – but go visit it for yourself!

When SROWA first approached us about this project, it was a bit of a dream job and a labour of love for us – we’re all about archives and spatial so to get the chance to pull these together has been a great opportunity.  It was something that we’ve been thinking about for some time (since our blog in 2015, “Hacking the Archives“) and it was great to see it come to fruition.

If you’d like to know more about RetroMaps and our work in archives or mapping (or both!), please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via jake.geddes@gaiaresources.com.au.

Jake

The post RetroMaps appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Obligatory photo I took of Uluru at sunset (left) – which I must say was spectacular from this vantage point and around the base (no – I didn’t climb). An example of Geoscience Australia hardcopy maps (right – source: Geoscience Australia).

They still offer their widely used digital map products of course, but while our car passed through the spinifex spotted plains and dirt tracks heading to telegraph stations, meteorite craters and memorials, this news filled me with a sense of sadness and resignation, in the same way one might feel about the passing of a former Prime Minister or great author. There is a lot of history tied up in topographic maps, and many stories and discoveries to be made as one passes their finger from where they are to where they could go. Some might say you get a bigger picture with a hardcopy map, a broader perspective on the landscape. However, I like so many of us tend not to feel the need for hardcopy maps anymore. In saying that, I can vividly remember when they were essential kit.

Anyone over 25 years of age probably remembers the UBD and how indispensable that was for getting around the city and suburbs, or finding that elusive house party? How many of us, upon getting our first car,  received one of these map books as a present from a wise friend or relative? Now of course all that content is reliably available on our phones at the press of a button. Or is that actually true? Let’s ignore the 2012 Apple Maps debacle for the time being… When you think of remote area travel, and battery charging, the digital content is not available all the time really is it? Although this is something we work on with our own apps at Gaia Resources – but more on that later.

Now back to the recap on my trip – I’ve just left Aileron Roadhouse (with its seriously impressive 17m high Man on the Hill  and equally impressive Anmatjere Woman and Child sculptures). We’ve already passed through Alice Springs after having camped at a spectacular spot called the Ellery Creek Big Hole in the West McDonnell National Park.

The 17m high sculpture of the Man on the Hill (left) and the Woman and child (right) puts Aileron Roadhouse on the map! Worth a stop.

This is a unique place of twisted folding rocks surrounding a water hole that would make any geologist forget how cold the water is and jump straight in to get to the other side (I feel a chicken joke coming on).

The Ellery Creek Bighole in the McDonnell Ranges was a seriously gnarly place 400 million years ago, and pretty impressive results today.

So within 2 minutes of driving north from Aileron we are again out of mobile data range, and I instinctively pull out the Australia Road and 4WD Atlas to reflect on the last few days travel and to look ahead. Yep, back to the hard copy map. In fact, the map book has been pulled out so many times now and used a way to discuss sealed and unsealed route options, distances and interesting spots to have lunch or stay overnight. It’s a way of sharing stories with fellow travellers at the pub and at the campground – friendly people who have been where you are going and can impart local knowledge of road conditions, food options and the value of taking a small detour to relax in one of many waterholes spotted through the truly massive Northern Territory.

 Our camping set-up at Devils Marbles (left) and the girls in my life relaxing at sunset. One of those magical places you might have driven past if it weren’t for someone at your campsite sharing their story.
Below: Play time! A Big Red joey kangaroo was being fostered at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre.

Using a map to share stories reminds me of the Australian indigenous people who have been doing something very similar for a lot longer than topographic maps have been around. We stepped in to look at a number of aboriginal art galleries on our trip into the Red Centre including at Uluru and Tennant Creek (the latter gallery had this little trooper at left as the main attraction).

It’s fascinating to learn how different regions use different styles of dot painting to share stories of the landscape, food (bush tucker) and water sources, and special meeting places.  In the  Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre in Tennant Creek for instance, we got to meet the female artists of the Barkely Region who paint circular patterns representing soaks (near surface water sources), bush tucker (grubs, ants, goannas) and medicinal plants.

In the region around Uluru, painting on canvas is relatively new but the women of the Anangu Uwankaruku Punu often combine dot paintings with the beautiful swaying leaf patterns representing medicinal plants like the Irmangka-Irmangka which is used as a sticky gel for tea, application on the chest for colds and headaches, or on bites and stings.

Groups around the Central Desert regions often employ the patchwork dot painting pattern I really like as a map geek because it practically represents an aerial interpretation of the landscape and different vegetation assemblages of their region. I can almost imagine the way in which their art serves a very practical purpose and focal point to educate and share knowledge.

I’m not saying that hardcopy topographic maps have been rendered to the status of a historical archive or art work – in fact we see old maps being re-used and delivering new insights to current challenges including the work Jake in our team has done previously with the State Records Office and their historical map archives. Visualisation of historical map features changing over time can help us understand the history of places and how cities grew and evolved. Government agencies are realising that their aerial imagery and cadastral map archives are treasure troves of information to help with planning decisions, genealogical enquiries and archaeological studies.

It’s been a long time since Gaia Resources had a plotter in the corner of the office pumping out large-scale maps for our clients – but it used to be all about those A0 and A1 plots depicting our client’s survey data, landuse and satellite imagery, unrolled fresh off the plotter and straight into a meeting of scientists and decision makers. As a spatial company in the early days, Piers would tell you we lived and breathed that kind of work.

These days we get more involved in system development and mobile applications with mapping functionality that depend on digital products like those from Geoscience Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology, and State government portals. Leveraging the Digital Earth Australia products for our NRM clients GRID web mapping system and Here as the base for the desktop app we’ve built for Wildlife Drones are good examples.

We have also pumped a fair amount of research and development into building an offline maps capability in our mobile applications – recognising that base maps like the 250k Topographic Series, Here, Google Maps and Mapbox offer offline APIs and are in demand for our clients working out beyond mobile range. In some cases – like for our Health department clients monitoring mosquitoes – it is actually as much about being offline in an urban environment where the field workforce can still collect location-specific field data using devices without SIM cards or wifi coverage.

Jake from our team near Tom Price demonstrating a Fulcrum-based project for the Banjima Rangers (left). Field data capture and access to base maps can be challenging when you are deep in the Western Australian bushland (right).

On reflection, what I think you realise as a mapping professional is that you haven’t given up on those hardcopy maps – you have been part of a story of their evolution into something that continues to have great relevance in people’s lives. I love hearing about a new insight from an old map made digital, or a new digital product that could be a game changer for our clients – just as much as I still enjoy thumbing over towns and tracks on my 4WD Atlas as I travel around this big red continent.

If you’d like to know more about our work with historical maps, or how we can deliver digital mapping products, systems and mobile apps to help with your business, then please feel to start a conversation on any of the regular channels ( Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook) or send me an email on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

The post Are hardcopy maps a thing of the past? appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We combined skills in spatial interaction to query and visualise the available data with the transformation of resulting data into a well-formed PDF document.  The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was the obvious choice for data acquisition as they provide an good range of web services to programmatically access and harvest their aggregated data.

Here’s what the team came up with for Fungi in the time available (illustrated below). You can read more about the issues in the previous blog post.

The interface we developed (with one of the field guide PDF files overlaid) – click on the image or here to try it yourself.

Given the success of this demonstration, our developers very quickly modified the code to also provide a Field Guide for Insects and then a Field Guide for Green Plants.

The operation of the mapping interface remains the same:

1. select your family of interest, or leave it set to ‘ALL’ families. The available families in the drop-down have been generated from a query of the ALA;
2. select the drawing tool on the left to draw a polygon around your land area of interest. (note: from the layer selection icon in the top right you can choose to display a street-map or a satellite image base layer);
3. press ‘Scan’ to display the available points within your defined area;
4. click on a point to display some metadata about the record;
5. it is possible to select a different family to display and the results will be automatically displayed;
6. when you have your preferred data set, hit ‘PDF’ to generate a field guide to the area;
7. a well-formed PDF document containing a table of species ordered alphabetically by family, genus and species, as illustrated in the inset above;
8. each table row ideally contains a referenced image (so that you can follow up on the creator and usage information), scientific name and author, family, and the contributing dataset.

This project continues to provide informative case studies for producing useful products from authoritative public datasets. It could be expanded upon and further configured to produce field guides for any other major taxonomic group. Given more time we would have liked to add point clustering and record counts to the map, a dynamically generated drop-down list of only the families occurring in the defined area and improved image attribution. The layout of the PDF could be further refined with the inclusion of a map of the area queried, a species index, and refined content presentation.

We’d again like to acknowledge the ALA for its continuing commitment to aggregating the scientific resources to provide a national view of Australia’s biodiversity, and the many image and data contributors to the ALA.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on these webmaps or have the need for a customised version of these online tools, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Dynamic Field Guides for Insects and Flora too appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Chris writes:
Having worked as professionals in consultancy, government and big business throughout our careers, it can be quite satisfying and refreshing to talk to students who are about to embark on their own careers. They are able to get a sense of the environment-focused projects we get involved in, and more often than not we can learn a thing or two ourselves.  It’s part of our on-going commitment to share knowledge of open spatial information and free and open source software, and to support capacity building within the environmental community.  As they enter the workforce our hope is that they take that awareness of these resources into their new teams and projects.

A good example of the available resources is our online QGIS training tutorials – which are a series of Youtube video tutorials we released last year in partnership with South Coast NRM to turn our classroom course material into a more accessible and free format. We had an inkling then that the videos would be a more enduring and accessible learning tool, but we could not have predicted how popular it would be for people around the world. Note: We are very close to being able to release the upgraded version of these videos corresponding to QGIS version 3.4 – so keep an eye out for that.

Global requests for our QGIS sample data and manual, to accompany our QGIS videos.

We still run our classroom style QGIS training and have done so for a few organisations in 2019. Rohan Fisher’s (@RohanFisher4) invite for me to talk was in fact an industry teaser into his own classroom training for students of the ENV208 – Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Thinking course, where he adapted exercises with local content and data from Kakadu National Park. While the course is focused on the wide field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and thinking about the world in a new way, Rohan was also keen to provide local context to equip students with the practical skills for analysing, visualising and synthesising spatial data.

Rohan Fisher started his QGIS tutorial with a mention of our online videos, and a cameo from Piers on screen.

With my introductory talk, I gave students an idea of how we use QGIS and Saga open-source software across our business and as a critical tool in our projects. (We often use proprietary products like ArcGIS as well where our clients prefer it, but we put an emphasis on open-source software use because of its potential for building capacity within our NRM and other clients’ programs and workflows.)

I gave some examples of site selection studies, drone data analysis, and even data quality support for software engineering products like DolphinWatch and GRID. From our friends at Katanning Landcare who use QGIS to evaluate farmers’ proposals for fencing and landcare activities, to IGO who use it to underpin their disturbance and rehabilitation monitoring data management processes.  It is not just about cost savings either. These organisations are adopting these open-source products because they are easy to use, contain loads of useful tools and plug-ins, and there is a large global support community of caring people willing to help.

The other area of my talk was around the open data policies and portal resources available from governments at a regional, national and international scale. I showed how government vector and raster data was available as free downloads and web services on searchable catalogues (e.g. Western Australia and Queensland, Geoscience Australia, NASA and the European Space Agency).  The Northern Territory government, for instance, recognised the need to consolidate publicly available data offerings from several agency sites and to make that content more accessible from a single point of truth – and the NT portal was just released a few days ago.

It was a great opportunity to share some of my project experiences with students at Charles Darwin University, and I’ll be following up with Rohan to see how they made out. It did bring back some pleasant (and not so pleasant) memories of my own university days where I sometimes battled to understand the practical application of the things I was learning. Hopefully, I’ve turned on a few light bulbs with this crew and who knows I may be working alongside them in years to come.

Now Sylvia, reporting in our Queensland office, writes:

On 21 May 2019, I and four others were invited to present to undergraduate students of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland.

The students that we presented to are enrolled in an Introduction to Earth Observation course delivered by Professor Stuart Phinn.

Stuart’s course had covered the theory of Earth Observation (EO) data including:

• spectral, spatial and temporal characteristics of imagery acquired by sensors hosted on satellite, airborne, drone and scanner platforms,
• image processing techniques applied to these datasets such as orthorectification and mosaicking, and
• image analysis of these datasets such as classification and change detection.

The course had also exposed students to some of the research applications of EO data within the School, such as used in coastal marine studies.

In addition to research applications, Stuart was also interested in exposing his students to how EO imagery is used by industry and government groups and hence his approach to my colleagues and I to speak about how we use EO data in our work.

Stuart had chosen a diverse range of applications and organizations to present to his class, including EO and spatial specialists from 3 commercial companies and from 2 government agencies.

On behalf of Gaia Resources, I described how EO data was used in two of our spatial projects i.e. the Malleefowl Site Selection Project and the Telfer Mesa Detection Project.

Overview map of the Malleefowl site selection project, showing the WA portion of the Great Victoria Desert.

I am pleased to report that Stuart received comments from a number of students saying how helpful and useful our presentations were in giving context and application to the theory that they had studied. I hope that we may also have encouraged some of these students to consider spatial science and particularly applications in Earth Observation as a career.

I am also very thankful to Stuart for inviting me to present on behalf of Gaia Resources. There are so very many exciting and interesting applications of EO data that we use in our business and it is my great pleasure to promote and advertise these; but I am also always very excited to learn about any new and innovative applications of this wonderful information source.

Feel free to drop Sylvia or Chris a line to ask about QGIS, open data, Earth Observation or anything we discussed, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post Supporting students around the country appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Why not try out this prototype phenology tool that I’ve also prepared using the ‘wandoo’ data yourself? Then leave a comment below, start a chat with me via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Phenological analysis of Eucalyptus wandoo for honey bee foraging appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Heres another gauntlet thrown down by Piers: assemble a GIS tiger team for fifty hours to explore ‘what can you do help people visualise readily available spatial data for a significant group of organisms in their particular area of interest AND let them download a field guide for just those taxa’.

Barbara and Jake G. tackled the spatial side of the question while Jake T. explored ways to transform the resulting data into a well-formed PDF document.  The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was the first choice as they provide an impressive range of web services to programmatically access and harvest their aggregated data.

Here’s what the team came up with (illustrated below).

Drawing on large data sets presents its own issues, and there are some 750,000 fungi specimen and observation records available in the ALA. For query and presentation responsiveness we chose to limit the query to just one large order in Kingdom Fungi – the Agaricales.  Similarly, limits to the number of records retrieved (500) were also implemented in case the area drawn is very large.  Currently, the tool is aimed at medium-size areas, such as Bold Park, a coastal conservation reserve in Perth, as illustrated below.

The interface we developed (with one of the field guide PDF files overlaid) – click on the image or here to try it yourself.

So here’s how you use the mapping interface:

1. select your fungal family of interest, or leave it set to ‘ALL’ families. The available families in the drop-down have been generated from a query of the ALA;
2. select the drawing tool on the left to draw a polygon around your land area of interest. (note: from the layer selection icon in the top right you can choose to display a street-map or a satellite image base layer);
3. press ‘Scan’ to display the available points within your defined area;
4. click on a point to display some metadata about the record;
5. it is possible to select a different family to display and the results will be automatically displayed;
6. when you have your preferred data set, hit ‘PDF’ to generate a field guide to the area;
7. a well-formed PDF document containing a table of species ordered alphabetically by family, genus and species, as illustrated in the inset above;
8. each table row ideally contains a referenced image (so that you can follow up on the creator and usage information), scientific name and author, family, and the contributing dataset.

This project provides an informative case study for producing useful products from authoritative public datasets. It could be expanded upon and further configured to produce field guides for any major taxonomic group.

Given more time we would have liked to add to the map point clustering and record counts, and a dynamically generated drop-down list of only the families occurring in the defined area and we’d really like to do more on attributing those images properly!

We uncovered some technical issues also, such as repeated 404 timeouts with retrieving ALA data, and noted the lack of map tile services at the scale required.  Similarly, the species-level data is uneven, with a lack of representative images or descriptive text to better meet the real-world requirements of a Field Guide.  We also need to check through some of the delivered data in more detail – some of the data we receive appears to be getting truncated along the line.

Never-the-less, given the fifty person-hours available, we are quite happy with this result!

We’d like to acknowledge the ALA for its continuing commitment to aggregating the scientific resources to provide a national view of Australia’s biodiversity, and the RBG Victoria’s FungiMap project, which has contributed much of the data we have harvested for this project.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the webmap, or know more about how we can help you with research programs, data management or spatial information systems, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Challenge: Dynamic Fungi Field Guide appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Hub researchers joined with decision-makers, land managers, NGOs and community organisations in Perth to discuss findings and research collaborations of relevance to Western Australia. Presentations covered a wide range of topics including talks on the most imperilled WA species, the efficacy of safe havens, community engagement for threatened species and the role research partnerships play in informing on-ground actions such as species translocations and reintroductions.

Of particular interest was the talk Elisa Bayraktarov (UQ) on developing a Threatened Species Index for Australia as a method for providing a standard comparative scientific method for understanding the rates of species decline while raising the public profile of our threatened species. The first Index, for threatened bird species, will be launched at the upcoming Ecological Society of Australia Annual Conference in Brisbane in November.

This topic led us into discussions back at Gaia HQ as to how publicly-available data can be assembled to show the stories of threatened species, as well as the processes that are potentially contributing to their decline. We set two of our spatial team the task of developing within four days a time series web map to illustrate key data elements for one of Australia’s top 20 mammals most at risk of extinction – Leadbeater’s Possum (Gymnobelideus leadbeateri), and the results are pretty powerful (click on the image to open the web map in a new window):

In just four days, Barbara and Jake created the web map with the following spatial layers:

1. Possum observations: 1179 unrestricted, publicly available points from 1950 to 2018, from Victorian Biodiversity Atlas fauna records.
   In the timeline we set these points to display only for the length of the year they were made. The complete set of observations is available to display in the layer control on the top right;  
2. Parks and reserves boundaries: 350 polygons from 1919 to 2018, from Collaborative Australian Protected Areas Database (CAPAD) 2016 and filtered to show only conservation and national parks and reserves,
3. Logging coupes for Mountain Ash: 4148 polygons from 1960 to 2017, from Spatial Datamart Victoria.
   In the timeline we set these polygons to display for the length of twenty years on the simplistic assumption that subsequent regrowth could again provide possum habitat after that length of time. Actual land use is included only by visual inspection of the recent satellite imagery made available as an alternative base layer.
4. Logging exclusion zones: 1028 polygons from 2014 to 2018, from Spatial Datamart Victoria,
5. Black Saturday fire extent: 87 polygons from the 2009 event, from Spatial Datamart Victoria,
6. Cartographic base layer sourced from CartoDB and satellite imagery from ESRI World Imagery,
7. Significant events text: primarily sourced from Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum fact page.

The web mapping application is built with Leaflet and multiple plugins were incorporated to create a timeline slider, minimap reference locator, and legend.   The following image is a zoomed extent to a northern population of Leadbeater’s Possum displaying content from all these spatial layers.  To be honest, the data wrangling took more time than building the web map (which is all using open source software and plugins!).

Try out the live web map yourself – we’d really be interested in your feedback!  Of course, this is not a scientifically robust model but rather an example of what can be assembled to graphically illustrate a range of events that together can tell stories about threatened species survival in the face of threatening processes, and the ongoing actions to help conserve the species.

The main challenges in this exercise were:

• locating relevant datasets for a species we were not familiar with,
• acquiring Victorian datasets and deciding which ones were most suitable,
• deciding which events had the most impact to display on the web map  timeline,
• understanding the major threats and portraying them on the web map,
• converting shapefiles into formats suitable for web mapping,
• building a visually pleasing and informative web map,
• the timeline slider can only handle so much data and will slow down significantly if too much is added. For example we originally intended to add all available fire history for the study area, however, we found that attempting to visualise c.9000 polygons from 1928-2018 made the timeline slider unusable,
• preparing the data for inclusion in the timeline slider was tedious – considerable geometry simplification and attribute editing were necessary to export timeline ready data.

Nevertheless, we consider this style of spatial visualisation a useful method for presenting data and developing compelling conservation stories for researchers and the community.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the webmap, or know more about how we can help you with research programs, data management or spatial information systems, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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