First up was our work on Retromaps, which recently won the Spatial Enablement category of the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards for Western Australia. 

This project started a very long time ago when we started thinking about what to do with maps in Archives around Australia.  We had been working with the State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA) on implementing a new Archival Management System for their use (based on the open source Access To Memory platform), and so we picked up some publicly available maps and in December 2015, we georeferenced a few, and did a basic web map (located here).  Then, in 2016, Damien Hassan from SROWA came to one of our QGIS training courses, and we talked about how to digitise those maps (again, here).  Damien worked on the digitisation of those 2,202 plans over the course of the next few years, and Retromaps was born from that massive effort.  Next thing I know, Damian Shepherd and I are standing in front of a room full of spatial people accepting an award for the project on behalf of our teams that worked so hard on this project.

About a week later, we were invited by the team at South Coast NRM to watch the 2021 Australian BioSecurity Awards, where there was particular mention of the Project Dieback project – which we have assisted with the development of the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System (DIDMS), which was again contributed to by a large group of people over the years.  Their acceptance speech was a good one to see:

There’s nothing better than hearing that our clients have won awards for work that we’ve done with them, as it really does make us feel like we’ve done a good job.  Some, like Retromaps, end up being years in the making, but that’s still a great reminder of what we’ve delivered.

Really – what we want to say is “thank you” to our clients for choosing us to work with them, and hopefully we can help our future clients win more awards!

If you would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you, then feel free to get in touch via email, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

P.S. For those not in Australia – the title “Straight to the pool room” is a great line from an Australian film called “The Castle”, meaning that it’s worthy of being treasured!

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The local Larrakia people actually observe 6 seasons (November and December is “Balnba” or Rainy Season), and in many respects I think that is more appropriate than the two “Wet” and “Dry” because there are significant changes between the Big Wind Time, the Build Up, the Rainy Season and the Monsoon Season.

The Gulumoerrgin Season calendar has six overlapping seasons and characteristics (Source: CSIRO and contributors Lorraine Williams, Judith Williams, Maureen Ogden, Keith Risk and Anne Risk)

I’m pretty sure I was already sweating the moment I got out of my car en-route to a Territory NRM conference workshop at the Charles Darwin University Waterfront Campus at 7:30am, but I’m mostly used to it now. “It’s a thing” as my colleague Tony likes to say, and it is only temporary. At this time of year the sun is hot, and clouds start to gather in the afternoon while the humidity rises, and on rare late afternoons the sweet relief of rain buckets down for an hour or so to cool us all down.

That day though was one of those hide-from-the-sun-like-a-vampire sort of days (fine if you stay in the shadows) – and silly me I was wearing pants on this particular day. Unlike the park rangers, land managers and researchers gathered at the conference who do a lot of work out in the field conducting savanna burning programs, protecting rock art and preserving biodiversity – I tend to sit in an air conditioned office most of the time tapping away at the computer and really can’t hold a candle to the important work these people do.

What we are trying to do though, is help by increasing the accessibility and power of data to aid in their planning and decision making. So at this workshop I was helping to demonstrate the new tools and technology being leveraged by the the North Australia and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) service. The NAFI team have been busy development of new tools, the SMERF dashboard and enhanced services on their website. Our part in this has been to develop a plugin for QGIS that increases the accessibility of the NAFI data products on that free and open-source GIS platform, and a mobile app for Android and iOS that provides near real-time fire mapping in the field.

Peter Jacklyn shows workshop attendees around the features of the NAFI website.

Participants at the workshop got to see a sneak peek of the app that is still in development, including the live fire hotspots and firescars against a backdrop of 3 base map options. We got some valuable feedback from Kakadu Park Rangers and others about how the app would be useful and what would make it even better in the next version. So there was real excitement about the ability to download imagery and topo maps for offline use, and the way in which the app automatically updates hotspots and firescars while you are online (and have the app active). The directional GPS position was also really important for field crew, and they showed us how they are currently producing static PDF maps and sending them out with field crews. One of the most interesting insights was to hear that rangers are able to receive a decent 3G/4G signal while in the air above a remote area – so theoretically our app could be updating information while in the air to be used offline back on the ground. We got some other really good ideas out of the interactions at the workshop, and so I am looking forward to continuing to work with the NAFI team.

I also attended one day of the conference itself, and went along to the Gala Dinner to see the deserving recipients of Territory NRM awards. There were some pretty interesting talks – including research findings from Bretty Murphy (Charles Darwin Uni – RIEL) about the shocking impact of two amplifying issues, of fire and feral cats, facing small threatened mammals in the Top End. The one that captured everyone’s heart though, was from school kids at the Manyalluk School and their teacher Ben Kleinig. Ben’s initiative to seek and use STEM funding for educational applications with a drone and motion sensor cameras – and these indigenous childrens’ enthusiasm – was truly inspiring. Here’s the description from the Territory NRM conference program:

“Students from Manyallaluk School are passionate about their country and through STEM subjects are gaining skills to fly drones; record, graph and analyse data; present findings; set-up of trail cameras and camera traps; and to use a snake camera. Key topics are buffalo and their impact on the environment, how plastic waste can harm turtles, different habitats for different species, and surveying species with a focus on comparing feral to native animal numbers. Students have been empowered to think about interesting careers that utilise technology in the environment, including land management, and plans for the future include a partnership with TNRM to build a feral animal exclusion zone to study and survey, using DNA testing to locate and map Gouldian finches and other species, ongoing surveying of wildlife in different habitats, and the ongoing challenge of photographing the elusive echidna.”

They have their own Youtube channel (with videos like the one we saw below), and I smile every time I think about the kids in lab coats showing their charts and saying “Let’s see what the data tells us.” As someone who gets passionate about data and data science, it is really uplifting to see technology, data and environmental issues being tackled by young regional students. Not surprisingly they won the Next Generation NRM Award.

So another great year for NRM in the Territory, and a fantastic job by the Territory NRM organisation in bringing us all together. If anyone wants to find out more about our collaboration with the NAFI team, or to chat about ways in which we can help with your NRM projects please feel free to start up a conversation on our regular channels on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

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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. 

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This years theme was Phytophthora Dieback – Tools for the Future, covering a range of contemporary topics such as recent developments in research and technology, and insights on industry engagement and land management. As with many events during the COVID-19 situation, the conference allowed the opportunity for experts, speakers and attendees to join together in person or online to contribute from local, state and international perspectives.

Some significant highlights for us included:

• the chance to catch up with many of our south coast clients
• learning about their work current practices and future directions, and how Gaia Resources can help
• the potential use of Phytophthora Dieback management practices in other industries, e.g. in managing other soil-borne diseases
• seeing how management goals have shifted over the years in response to previous management outcomes

The best highlight for me was the field trip to the beautiful Wireless Hill Park for a demonstration of Phytophthora Dieback management practices.

Tilo Massenbauer or Tilomass Consulting discusses the dynamics of public behavioural change	A demonstration of sampling a Phytophthora Dieback infested plant specimen
Anigozanthos manglesii at Wireless Hill Park, Perth	Diuris corymbosa at Wireless Hill Park, Perth

If you’d like to know more about our work in this area, please drop me a line at tracey.cousens@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tracey

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We are always looking to improve GRID to create further efficiencies for the user and increasing data quality. One suggestion that arose during the workshop was to see whether it was possible to enter field data on a tablet device in remote areas. This would allow SCNRM staff to plot their work areas, fill out form fields and upload photos straight to their newly created GRID feature.

On the second day of the workshop Tracey, together with a few of the workshop participants, went out to Mt Manypeaks north-east of Albany, to a granite outcrop with cultural significance at the edge of Lake Pleasant View. SCNRM Project Officer for Cultural Heritage Peter ‘Twigg’ Twigg has been working there with local indigenous teams focussing on weed management.

Twigg and Ray used GRID on the iPad to perform a variety of common tasks. With Tracey’s guidance, Twigg was able to:

• add features to his GRID instance including points, lines and polygons, and upload PDFs and images,
• take photos on the iPad and load them directly into GRID – a great time saver as it avoids double-handling images back at the office.

Of course, we also discovered some of the current limitations of using GRID in a web browser on a mobile device, such as:

• employing tablets with 4G connectivity would have been helpful, but we were able to hotspot from our phones and use SCNRM’s wifi-only iPads without much hassle,
• GRID does not yet have a mobile responsive design, so there were some limitations and display issues such as some menus overlapping, and a popup the popup window that couldn’t be closed.

So, future enhancements necessary to use GRID in the field would include:

• a mobile-responsive design,
• a GPS location button that users can tap so the map zooms to their current location,
• offline data entry when field work is done outside the range of mobile networks.

Please note, this will be the last face-to-face training session we undertake for the foreseeable future, given the COVID-19 shutdowns in place across Australia. However, we do freely provide a great set of QGIS online training videos for those who would like to upskill during this downtime. (You can keep up to date with Gaia Resources responses to the COVID-19 in these posts).

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

Alex

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Hosted by the Indigenous Carbon Industry Network (ICIN) on Larrakia country at Charles Darwin University, fire managers, indigenous land managers, carbon industry practitioners, scientists and policy-makers from across Australia meet to reflect, connect and share knowledge about savanna fire management.

Members gather for the inaugural Indigenous Carbon Industry Network Meeting at the North Australian Savanna Fire Forum in February 2019. Photo courtesy ICIN.

This is my second time attending the Forum and it’s a great opportunity to meet people in the industry, including fire ranger groups, government staff at Environment and Primary Industry departments, NRM groups, Commonwealth environmental regulators and Not-for-profit organisations as well as researchers, pastoralists and Carbon Farming consultants.

I’m looking forward to hearing about how ranger groups and traditional owners are proactively managing their land, conserving biodiversity and reducing Australia’s carbon footprint through early-season burning. These ‘world-leading’ Indigenous Land Management practices in Northern Australia provide opportunities to learn and share knowledge across jurisdictions, especially in light of the bushfire crisis in southern parts of Australia.

For example, the North Australian and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI)’s innovative fire map infographics and fire history videos provide historical context to Savanna fire management activities.

I’m also interested in hearing more about the relationship between fire severity, feral animals and small mammals in savanna landscapes. I’ll be taking lots of notes over these two days, and I’ll follow up with a review of the Forum in next week’s blog post.

PS. We’re running 1-day QGIS training courses straight after the Forum, on Thursday 20th and Friday 21st February 2020, 8:30 – 16:30 ACST at the Darwin Innovation Hub. There are a few spaces left, and you can find all the details on our Event page, or contact me directly via chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

If you’d like to know more about particular projects or talks presented at the Forum, you can leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me, as above.

Chris

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The app allows the community to record sightings of certain urban wildlife species, which feeds into research and evidence-based management of these species. First launched in early 2017, it originally included modules for flying foxes, beneficial insects and some species of frogs.

We are very excited to have added a possum and glider module recently, as part of a collaboration between the Threatened Species Recovery (TSR) Hub and the CAUL Hub.

The possum and glider module follows a similar format to other three, with clear screens for recording observations, uploading data and viewing all possum and glider records on a map.

There are 27 species of possum and glider across Australia, so to save users scrolling through all 27 species when making an observation, we configured the app to provide a customised list of species for each user based on their current location (using a geofencing approach).

Possum and glider module in the CAUL Urban Wildlife App

I really enjoyed working with lead researcher Dr Rochelle Steven (University of Queensland) on this new module. Rochelle is very passionate about Australia’s possums and gliders and believes people in the community can do a lot to help support better conservation, especially in urban areas.

“Some people think urban areas are not important for threatened species conservation, but some species are only or mainly found in urban areas, like South Western Australia’s Critically Endangered western ringtail possum,” said Dr Steven.

“Almost a quarter of our possums and gliders are listed as threatened under Australian environmental law, and many more show signs of decline.

“The main threat to Australia’s possums and gliders is habitat loss, but in urban areas, dogs, cats, being hit by cars are also major problems.

“Knowing where species are and how they are using the urban environment is an important first step to conserving them, and we are calling on citizen scientists to help us by submitting sightings through the CAUL Urban Wildlife app”.

In this video, Rochelle describes her research into using citizen science for the management of threatened species, and the addition of the possum and glider module to the Urban Wildlife App.

Video about citizen science research (source: TSR Hub Facebook)

For more information about the research project see the TSR Hub news.

The possum and glider citizen science project is a collaboration between the Threatened Species Recovery Hub and the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, with funding from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program and the National Landcare Program through the South West Catchments Council.

The CAUL Urban Wildlife app is freely available on both iOS and Android platforms, and can be downloaded from the Gaia Resources pages on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

For more information about the modular approach and technical solution we implemented for the Urban Wildlife App, please see our project summary.

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

Gill

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Day 1-2: Savanna Fire Forum 

The first two days focused around savanna burning, carbon abatement and carbon sequestration, with key themes including:

• Sharing stories and knowledge
• International, national and regional initiatives
• New sequestration methodologies
• Monitoring and evaluation
• New developments and training
• Panel discussion with the industry leaders

Gaia Resources has some experience in supporting groups who get involved in the fire management industry, such as our friends in the RangelandsNRM group, Conservation Management (through their work with the Pilbara based Banjima Ranger group) and Bushfire Prone Planning; but I must admit this forum was an eye-opener in terms of the breadth of experience and capabilities, and wide range of stakeholders in this sector. The following are just some of my thoughts and observations from the perspective of an interested data scientist new to the Top End – so feel free to point out if I’ve misrepresented anything.

Hundreds of professionals packed the lecture theatre at Charles Darwin University to hear industry experts talk about a range of Savanna Fire topics.

Carbon abatement in this context refers to the avoidance of large-scale severe fires that destroy woody vegetation, but paradoxically the way to achieve that is to burn stuff, albeit in a controlled way. Across the north of Australia this woody vegetation represents a massive carbon sink – actively taking carbon out of the atmosphere and helping to offset our nation’s emissions from other sources. It is almost counter-intuitive to think that a program of burning would help in the fight against climate change (seeing as that burning itself releases carbon), but through better land management practices involving the controlled burn-off of fuel load (mainly grasses) at the right time of year – Indigenous ranger groups and their industry partners are able to reduce the severity and destruction of bushfires later at the driest time of the year. In fact, savanna burning is something that our indigenous people have been doing for thousands of years!

Caring for country and the opportunity to get back onto the land was a strong recurring theme in the stories that were shared by ranger groups. So although I’ll talk about the science and the data and the policy later in this article, what really matters to the people on the ground is their connection to the land and the chance to contribute to the health and sustainability of land and culture for future generations. The conference was a great chance for ranger groups to share their stories, such as how birds of prey intentionally light fires to flush out wildlife.

Mimal Land Management has been managing fire for many years – this video talks about a bird they call Karrkanj (or “troublemaker”) who picks up burning sticks and flies to a fresh piece of grass to drop it. 

The conference really seemed like a win-win situation to me how the Commonwealth government is funding programs that helped to provide meaningful employment, reduce carbon emissions and support Indigenous culture and way of life. Striking the balance between the environmental, social and economical outcomes looked to be a big challenge, but one well worth the effort.

The key point from an environment perspective is that late dry season fires after about 1 August tend to be hotter and more destructive to the savanna landscape than the early dry season fires; or, put another way, if leaves and grasses can be burnt early in the dry season, then the carbon-sucking trees and big shrubs can hopefully live on for another year. Some of the presentations at the forum talked about project monitoring and evaluation, and the analyses that could demonstrate the effectiveness of conducting early season burns to prevent – or reduce destruction of – late season burns. Bar graphs abounded in the presentations showing program effectiveness through ratios of early season to late season percentages by year, and the so called “M-curve” was another graphical way that caught my attention to demonstrate how active fire management practices were making a difference. The statistics in this case were based on areas calculated from satellite imagery of projects across the Cape York Peninsula.

Natural Carbon presented aggregated fire scar area data for projects across the Cape York Peninsula and across areas with different land management intent, demonstrating in their M-curves that early dry season burning reduced late season fires.

The situation on the ground is more complex with many variables at play. For a start there’s a coverage problem, the vast areas of land we are talking about here can’t be burnt off with the limited number of people and resources available – so ranger groups need to think strategically and make informed decisions through mapping of fire history and estimating fuel load. This is all about mapping risk and making operational decisions, and it was encouraging to see that ranger groups were actively using satellite imagery resources such as the NAFI (North Australia Fire Information) website. NAFI offers time-series fire scar mapping and hotspot locations based on NOAA and NASA MODIS satellite data – with analysis and data management from Landgate, Geoscience Australia, the Darwin Centre for Bushfires Research and from Cape York Peninsula Sustainable Futures. Mapping the landscape in terms of years unburnt (as a proxy for fuel load) for instance could be one of tools to help prioritise where to apply limited resources.

The NAFI web map (left) provides a range of fire history layers for visualisation and data download, including fire scars by month, and the number of years burnt. The number of map requests (right) has seen a big uptick in recent years.

Weather and climate trends are major factors that influence fire frequency and behaviour, and also the logistics of carbon abatement projects. As I learnt in the forum, drying climate trends and weather patterns can narrow the time window available for controlled burning, and shift limited resources into a fire suppression mode (eg. bushfire fighting). The fire mapping from NAFI again becomes important for fire suppression planning, as (I suspect) does rainfall data, the location of fire breaks, roads and tracks. Radar and near real-time lightning strike data (from the Bureau of Meteorology and Landgate) could also be important operational information; for example, in one presentation we heard that storms can build up in one region without dropping any precipitation, and as the system passes through the lightning strikes ignite many small fires that need early attention.

Fire scar mapping with an overlay of fire breaks shows the effectiveness – or otherwise in some cases – of these suppression techniques.

The subject of weeds – and in particular Gamba grass – came up over and over as a major factor influencing the severity and behaviour of fires in Australia’s north. This tall grass was originally introduced in the 1930’s as a cattle feed but it has since infested an estimated 1.5 million hectares of the Northern Territory alone and is one of 32 weeds of national significance. Fires are so severe where Gamba grass infestations are present that they can burn up to 9 times higher than native grass fires, and as a result the cost of controlling these types of fires is significantly higher (source: Gamba Grass Roots). The Northern Territory Weeds Management Branch have a Statutory Weed Management Plan for Gamba grass requiring landowners to report and remove it. For more information including maps of the weed’s distribution can be found on their website.

Grey Mackay from RangelandsNRM presented on fire management programs that organisation was coordinating in the Dampier Peninsula and Kimberley region of Western Australia, and some GIS visualisation wizardry to bring focus on the temporal change and relationship between early dry season and late dry season fires. After his talk, Grey and I used morning tea to check out the landscape model visualisations that Rohan Fisher from Charles Darwin University Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods had on show (more info on: https://www.landscapemodels.net ).

GIS software transparencies (left) to show different years of late dry season (LDS) fires in red and early dry season (EDS) fires in green (Courtesy of Grey Mackay). Rohan Fisher (right) explains his 3D printed landscape models and visualisation of bushfire spreading.

Rohan also presented the imagery resources available from the Sentinel-2 platform which consists of two satellites from the European Space Agency (ESA). This relatively new entrant on the satellite remote sensing scene offers free 10m resolution and 13 band multispectral imagery every 5 days over a given patch of ground. The increased resolution over Landsat imagery (at 30m) is quite significant, because it allows people working in this industry to see much more detail in the landscape. For instance, they can better assess the impact of fire breaks and the degree of fire ‘patchiness’ which might be used to understand the effectiveness of fire burning programs. Other fire-related applications are also possible with this information, including the study of remnant wildlife habitats and assessment of biodiversity impacts.

Bushfire burning in January, 2019 west of Alice Springs Northern Territory (source: Sentinel-2 from SnapPlanet)

If you haven’t seen it already the Sentinel Hub website is an excellent resource brought to us by Sinergise to help bring tailored web map services into a GIS application or website. You can use the free web map interface to specify date ranges, select off-the-shelf band combinations like True Colour,  NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index), Moisture Content and others. Sinergise also built a QGIS plug-in for accessing Sentinel imagery where you can get direct access to dates of imagery, minimum cloud cover and band combinations for use in desktop mapping. With a SentinelHub subscription you can set up your own custom web services and generate time series animations (GIFs) over your area of interest. As an aside, our team at Gaia Resources is constantly finding new ways of using these tools and the Sentinel-2 products (check out these blogs where we’ve discussed some of these).

Day 3 – Emissions Reduction Fund workshop

The third day was a separate workshop many of the same industry professionals attended which was more focused on the accounting and policy side of carbon abatement and sequestration. The Department of Environment and Energy  (DoEE) hosted the workshop at the Hilton Hotel in Darwin and reviewed changes to the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). The ERF “supports Australian businesses, farmers and land managers to take practical actions to reduce emissions and improve the environment”. As a bit of history (I am just coming up to speed with), in 2015 the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011 was amended to bring in the ERF which built on the Carbon Farming Initiative, expanding coverage to encourage emissions reduction across the Australian economy.

DoEE provides climate change advice to the Government, and delivers policies and programs like the ERF methods to reduce emissions and increase renewable energy uptake. The Clean Energy Regulator (CER) – who were co-presenting at the workshop – assess and administer carbon projects under the ERF, and assess project carbon credit reporting. Carbon abatement through controlled burning is one of many types of activities – or Methods as they are referred to – that are eligible for carbon credits (see this link for more info).

The workshop covered the two most recent savanna fire management methods that came in to force in April 2018 – credits emissions avoidance and carbon sequestration in dead organic matter. It was a good chance for me as a relative beginner in this space, to hear about how Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) are calculated, and differences between the 2015 and 2018 methods.  There was a healthy debate and discussion from attendees as the presenters moved through a number of topics, including:

• The consultative method of establishing the 2015 methods, and the different way the 2018 methods were brought on board,
• The option of converting existing savanna fire management projects to the 2018 version or keeping them as is,
• The Savanna Burning Abatement Tool (SavBAT3) as a GIS web map that automates the processes and mathematical equations for estimating net abatement for projects,
• Challenges around proponents being able to calculate baselines at project registration,
• The importance of demonstrating Eligible Interest Holder consent (eg. permission from Native Title holders, pastoralists and other groups with legal land rights).
• The role of declared weeds and the need to excise infestation areas from reporting (and the potential this process could be a disincentive to proponents),

As I mentioned earlier, being new to this industry meant that there was a lot to take in across the three days (and I’ve probably missed some important messages), but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience to meet new people and to hear their stories. It was also perhaps a chance to apply a fresh perspective to an evolving industry; despite the many ways in which the carbon industry is using satellite imagery and GIS – there seems to me to be a lot more potential there for technology and data science to make a difference. If you’d like to talk about it in more detail hit up our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts – or drop me a line on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

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The NRM “industry” in Australia is really more like a community.  Depending on where you are in Australia, your local NRM groups will be not-for-profit companies, government agencies, community groups and all sorts of different permutations of that.  Across all these different types of corporate vehicles, you meet some really passionate and interesting people from a wide range of backgrounds – conservation, farming, business, retirees, the works. They are really what keeps the whole NRM industry running.

The crowd at the recent Rangelands NRM AGM – a broad range of people attended from a really diverse set of backgrounds.

When we first met the NRM community, their work reminded me of the community we were part of when I was growing up on a small farm in the south-west of Western Australia.  A lot of passionate people, a lot of volunteers, all getting together to make their corner of the world just a little it better, in a bunch of different ways.  That includes things like helping advise on sustainable agricultural practices, fence off areas to protect them against feral animals, undertake weeding (like our Perth office team did before Christmas), running educational events, and all sorts of other things. Through these sorts of actions they manage, improve and protect the natural resources, and are a voice for the environment.

What we also saw was a need to help out with the technology side of things.

Our first, and probably the biggest, project with the NRM community was GRID.  Originally this was seen as a way to create a new corporate spatial system for the South West Catchments Council, one that was easy to use and tailored for the various activities that the NRM group undertook.  Keen to make sure the project delivered, we invested a lot of additional time and effort into the development of GRID on top of the funding we received through State NRM, including a second round to tweak GRID further.

We have been fortunate enough to be able to provide GRID to the NRM groups across Western Australia.  We’ve developed a way to do this that starts with a small project to establish GRID with the groups, customising it and setting up the various activities that they need.  Then for the ongoing costs, we also roll in monthly data updates of all their data, an annual training course wherever they wanted in their region (plus an administrator session), and unlimited phone and email support for their staff, and any of their community groups that use it.

Chris running some GRID training with the Peel Harvey Catchment Council

Making any generic product that has to suit a wide range of people means you’re not going to make everyone happy, and we take every bit of feedback about GRID very seriously.  We’ve been developing wish lists, capturing any and all feedback, and looking at the future of GRID and how we can look at making it even better in the next version – and how we fund it.  That’s the area that we’re actively looking at right now – pulling all the requirements together to start costing what it would take for the next version, and how we make this all stack up – not easy for a small business!

Along the way with GRID we’ve also delivered a lot of other projects in the NRM area, including web sites, spatial support and mapping, development of online shops, and we’ve even been involved in the grants process itself, through last year’s GRID Grants implementation (a lighter, simpler front end to GRID for the grants process that creates a baseline spatial area for the grants).

Spatial sciences has been a bit part of our history at Gaia Resources – we did, after all, start as a spatial company.  And when the South Coast NRM group, through Project Dieback, asked if we could help them with QGIS (a freely available, open source GIS package) training, we jumped at the chance, and created our freely available online QGIS training course.  Again, we invested heavily in this, and developed a course that has been taken up all over the world.

Our current map of the people who’ve asked for our training manual and data for the freely available online course.

The NRM community has been working hard, especially over the last year or so, at creating sustainable business models.  Meanwhile we’ve been looking at the same sort of business models and how we can make our technology offerings even more appropriate and sustainable.  We’re already working on an updated QGIS training course, pulling together GRID 2.0 requirements (which you can find in our Wish List) and even offering shared spatial services across the groups.

The best part of working with the NRM community is the people.  Frank, fearless and passionate, there’s no shortage of people telling us how we can improve and make things even better for them.  We’d love to hear from any NRM groups with ideas or requests for assistance – you can reach out via email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.  While the NRM community continues to look after the natural resources of the world, we’ll keep on supporting them for as long as they’ll let us.

I hope that’s for a while to come yet.

Piers

The post What is Natural Resource Management? appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The whole NRM community has been on a really exciting (and somewhat terrifying) ride over the last twelve-odd months with the massive changes that the Federal Government’s Regional Land Partnership funding has brought down upon on that community.  The main change – moving to a competitive model – has been a major psychological shift for the community. This hasn’t been easy for many of the NRM groups that we continue to support, so it was great to have a moment to look back at all the good work that one of them (that manages over 85% of the State of Western Australia) has managed to achieve.

A great part of the event was networking in the Japanese Gardens at the Perth Zoo (courtesy: Rangelands NRM)

The partners who presented really did represent the broad spectrum of organisations that an NRM group works with, including:

• The Pilbara Mesquite management Committee – a non=profit regional collaboration group, controlling mesquite (Prosopis species) and other Weeds of National Significance,
• Carey Downs Station – a quite visionary pastoral property that is working with Rangelands NRM to implement best practices for land management – while maintaining a focus on sustainability
• Ten Deserts Project – a collaboration of indigenous groups that is preserving knowledge of fire regimes, supporting and empowering indigenous groups and taking collective actions to build environmental resilience,
• Roebuck Bay Working Group – a great project that has been supported for some time by Rangelands NRM that works to collaboratively educate, conduct research and get the community involved in this important Ramsar listed area, and
• Spinifex Land Management – an indigenous non-profit group that, apart from cleaning up at the awards they’re nominated for (they won the 2018 National Landcare Award for Indigenous Land Management), also have one rockin’ band and a great video (which I can’t find online).

The resounding theme from my notes was the partners all thought of Rangelands NRM as the “glue” which holds them together, or as facilitators that enable them to get things done, or put them in touch with the right people.  This is a really valuable, independent service that is often overlooked by funding bodies who are looking for more traditional returns on their funding investment.

The role that the NRM regions play in glueing these groups together, and enabling them to become more successful, is something that we see a lot of – and that’s a big reason as to why we support the NRM community here.  Our approach has been similar to the one I saw so clearly and repeatedly articulated at the celebration – we also try to join groups up and provide more holistic, collaborative services, like we have done with the GRID product, or making our QGIS training course freely available in an online format.

The foreword from our QGIS video series, explaining why we produced it

Now that the dust is settling on the Regional Land Partnership programs, we’re going to be back out there, trying to find even more ways that we can collaborate and provide support to the NRM community.  We’ve got a few ideas around sharing resources, developing more tools for common use and with potential projects already lining up, I’m hoping there will be a lot more in this space to blog about in the near future.  But throughout, we’re trying to emulate Rangelands NRM’s commitment to collaboration, and “be the glue” for the NRM community.

In the meantime, if you are an NRM group, or a Landcare organisation, and you’re struggling with technology, then please feel free to give us a call and have a chat about what we can do to help.  We like nothing more than a chinwag about technology problems, and can also be found on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn – or drop me a line on (08) 9227 7309 or at piers@gaiaresources.com.au.

Piers

The post Celebrating the rangelands appeared first on Gaia Resources.

After the warm and wise Welcome to Country by elder Gail Wynne, Cameron Crowe (Chair of the Dieback Working Group) provided a forward perspective of DWG. Key points in his talk included the confirmation that:

• there is no certainty of significant further funding for Project Dieback, but that
• the Group will continue to work closely with South Coast NRM, and that
• the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System (DIDMS) remains a crucial software platform into the future.

The DIDMS Platform, based on our GRID product, is a crucial asset in the fight against Phytophthora dieback

The keynote address by Dr Richard Walley strongly highlighted the need for inclusion of indigenous knowledge in the management of country. This message was amplified further by Tui Shortland (Director, Te Kōpū – Pacific Indigenous & Local Knowledge Centre) who presented on ‘Indigenous Wisdom: Phytophthora and Kauri Decline’ and outlined the Cultural Health Indicator Framework as a more comprehensive measure of ecosystem health.

A series of excellent speed-talks had attendees moving about the venue, including Tilo Massenbauer’s (South Coast NRM) introduction to the DIDMS. It was apparent that many workers in the field had yet to evaluate the benefits of this powerful information system. We are looking forward to adding further facility to this system in the coming year by adding methods for Risk Hazard Assessment.

Tilo explaining DIDMS in the speed session

After a busy lunch, Karen Warner (Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council) came up with a brilliant statistic to introduce her talk:

“Volunteering is worth more to Australia than mining.
Volunteering in Australia is worth $290 billion annually.”

On reflection, I found five major take-away messages from the day:

1. funding is being seriously reduced for the key agencies and alternate sources and strategies must be found,
2. the community is diverse, committed and ready to take dieback management to the next level,
3. indigenous knowledge has the potential to greatly contribute to the management and protection of our native ecosystems,
4. a single flexible data management and sharing platform is needed for all workers in this field (which sounds a lot like DIDMS!), and
5. social scientists need to research the barriers to communicating the need to care for and protect the country.

If you’d like to 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 Dieback Information Group Conference 2018 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So, what’s a hackathon?

It’s this slightly crazy concept where a big organisation with business challenges – relating to technology or data – opens up to the wider technology community to help them, in the hopes that a fresh pair of eyes might give them that innovative spark and the beginnings of a solution. The involvement is limited to a weekend in most cases, with intensive ideation, concept development, data crunching and programming brought to bare. A bit like a marathon (from where it gets its trendy name) participants stretch themselves to the limit and come away from the event pretty exhausted. Also like a marathon, there can be many winners apart from the ones who bring back the ‘trophy’.

The brave souls of the Gaia hackathon team making their way down the terrace, blissfully unaware of the punishment ahead. 

Aghack was hosted by the Ministry of Data (MoD), sponsored by the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development  (DPIRD) who supplied the challenges, mentors and heaps of data resources) and SPUR (who also supplied a mountain of data resources):

“The team from SPUR, powered by Landgate, have been supporting events like MoD for several years now by coordinating access to open data from government; and providing technical help for hackathon teams. We’ve learned a lot about how to help people get their ideas off-the-ground; and we’re expanding our offerings to include simpler licensing, grants and shared office space to assist innovators and start-ups.” Damian Shepherd

There were financial prizes for the teams who came up with the best pitch of their hackathon prototypes, and a bunch of minor prizes focused on supporting startups. For us it wasn’t so much about winning the prizes. We were looking at it as a chance to learn about DPIRD’s business challenges – having a coversation with different units within an existing client of ours was a big reason to head along. It was also about learning some new techniques and tools around software engineering and data analysis. Finally, you wouldn’t give up the majority of your weekend without hoping it would be a bit of fun! On this front we didn’t quite know what to expect.

Out of the eight challenges put forward – some about tracking sheep and grading grain, others about pest detection and farming optimisation – we settled on the one that we had a little bit of experience in: Monitoring the Rangelands. One of our Natural Resource Management (NRM) clients is Rangelands NRM, and we’ve spent several years supporting their important work through hosting, data management and analysis services.

The Rangelands makes up about two-thirds of the State of Western Australia – the scale of which makes monitoring a challenge no matter how you slice it. (Image source: Rangelands NRM)

Right off the bat though we knew the challenge was really broadly framed – there were themes of “using remote sensing data,” “better management decisions,” and “quality and condition of pastoral land for sustainable grazing” but it was light on specifics. So we reached out to our friends at Rangelands NRM to get their perspective. What does Rangelands Monitoring mean to them? What do they think is the real challenge here – apart from the fact the Rangelands region is massive in scale. What could we knock up in a weekend that would be the beginning of something truly useful?

They gave us some insight into how there is already a lot of technology and data available to pastoralists and DPIRD but not much that brings both the regulator and the land manager together. What we needed was a common view. I latched onto a couple themes here: collaboration and knowledge sharing.

There were other helpful hints – a recent Auditor General’s report sighted “declining Rangelands condition” and the need for a “comprehensive system that made better use of remote sensing” and included “lease level monitoring.”

We bring you…. Rangelands Rover

Images sourced from RangelandsNRM

We focused on a simple-to-use mobile mapping app – which we called “Rangelands Rover” – that collects local information and sends that directly to an instance of  GRID, our easy-to-use online GIS for NRM organisations, so that DPIRD can build up a better understanding of the condition of the Rangelands. The information that is captured by the app includes:

• geotagged photographs,
• condition assessments (e.g. Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor)
• environmental factors (e.g. erosion, fire etc.),
• sensor readings (e.g. temperature, humidity, soil moisture etc.)

It’s a pretty basic app, but the bare bones we created in the weekend work pretty well, as shown below.

The Rangelands Rover app workflow allows the pastoralist to walk through data entry, photo capture, and map view.

We also know we can add other resources to this app (e.g. Bureau of Meteorology weather conditions and trends, soil acidity, drone imagery) – but just not in a weekend!  What we were able to add in the weekend though, was Bluetooth integration to a sensor that we put together with an Arduino board and some bits and pieces bought at the local electronics store.

Voon-li’s sensor array and a container of soil we brought into test moisture readings (top), and an artist’s rendition of what the finished product could look like (bottom).

So the app is able to be used “offline” (without a data connection), contains Sentinel satellite imagery and other mapping layers, collects data from the soil moisture/temperature/humidity sensor that we created, photographs from the camera on the device, allows the user to enter other information from pick lists and date selectors, and publishes all the submitted data to GRID when back online via a data connection.

GRID displaying pastoral leases and Sentinal 10m resolution imagery. The 3 Sentinal views are True Colour (top), NDVI or vegetation condition (centre) and Moisture Content (bottom).

The whole idea was that we would provide a mobile mapping solution that becomes an indispensable tool to the pastoralist.  When the pastoralist is then armed with this information across their lease (e.g. climate trends, weather,  vegetation condition, time series satellite imagery, soils data, infrastructure), they can make more informed and sustainable management decisions, while also improving the data right across the Rangelands.

An overview of the RangelandsRover concept

In a lot of ways, Rangelands Rover could be part of a win-win solution where the pastoralist gets information to combine with their local knowledge to better manage their lease and the regulator gets the much needed on-ground verification of what they can see happening on a regional scale through satellite imagery.  Those of us that were in the weekend really thought we had a good proof-of-concept to build on – and that was echoed by the rest of the team when we re-pitched it to them.

The weekend was very, very intense, but to deliver all we did in that timespan was really an accomplishment, although we didn’t bring home any trophies.  Since the hackathon, we’ve revisited our work, what we produced, and we’ve re-pitched it internally to our team to look at how we could improve our pitches in the future.  Already we’re reviewing how the outcomes can really help our other work – we’ve already integrated a trial of Sentinel imagery into all of the GRID instances we operate.

To answer the question, did we have fun? We did, but we all needed some down time afterwards – it really was like running a marathon.

If you’d like to know more, or are thinking about a mobile mapping app for your own business, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au

 Chris

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