The title intrigued me – as this is basically what Gaia Resources was set up to do from the start, way back when I founded it in 2004.  The aim was to combine my interests of technology and the environment to see how we can help make the world a better place, which has become our formal mission statement in the last couple of years:

“Gaia Resources is a consultancy that responsibly delivers sustainable technology solutions to make the world a better place.”

The event was primarily aimed at an academic or research audience, although the speakers came from a few different places and from a few different backgrounds, including research organisations, industry and government organisations.  The event itself was a free-flowing panel discussion, which took me on a pretty interesting journey for a Friday afternoon.  Along the way, there were a range of discussions around some pretty interesting topics, and resonated around a range of our existing work in the data science and high performance compute space. 

One of the threads that stuck with me was around the lack, or lag, of skillset development in the biodiversity and high performance computing space.  There were a few other threads around the economics of the environment, and societal changes, but the skillset one really stuck in my head across the weekend afterwards, so I’ve focused this blog on that aspect (and there are heaps of different theories and studies around this lag out there in business management circles).

At Gaia Resources, apart from working on a wide range of interesting projects, we try to develop our skills across multiple areas, including subject matter areas (e.g. archives, biodiversity, etc), and also in the use of technology (our Amazon Web Services partnership is an example of that).  However, we also need people to interface between them, which is where our Data Science unit comes in – on our team there are a mix of subject matter experts, technologists, and analysts that sit in between and help facilitate development of highly valuable solutions for our clients.

At the event, I noted multiple times that there are a range of projects or programs we are involved with around Australia to try to address that lag, such as the Business Research and Innovation Initiative grants, which we recently were successful in receiving.  Providing opportunities for researchers and industry to work together often takes that external stimulus, and that’s an important thing for governments and other groups to consider if we want to reduce that lag across the board.

Another good example of this lag, and how we can help address it, is via our support for the Taxonomy Australia Decadal Plan for Taxonomy and Biosystematics in Australia and New Zealand (a link is provided below).  This plan is all about accelerating species discovery in the region – so that we can discover and document this biodiversity in a generation, rather than several centuries.  This is aligned so clearly to our own mission at Gaia Resources that we’ve stepped in to volunteer our services to assist Taxonomy Australia, and we’re providing support and developing some technology prototypes for them that might help with this acceleration (more on that to come in a future blog). 

Taxonomy Australia’s Decadal Plan

This also is why we work with Archives around Australia.  One thing that was discussed at the event was that there is a challenge of not being able to store biodiversity research data in a sustainable way – something that the Archives have managed, and that we’ve been working collaboratively with them on for some time.  Looking outwards at the Archives industry, especially around Digital Preservation activities, such as the pilot we’ve just completed for Queensland State Archives (again, more on that to come in another blog) will certainly help to bring that expertise back into the biodiversity community.  Those sort of linkages are often overlooked!

These examples are all part of how industry can help reduce that lag between innovation or research and implementation, how a cross-industry approach delivers benefits, and how industry can apply our technology skills to organisations that need that support to help them innovate and accelerate.  In the meantime, we’ll keep on working towards trying to cross-fertilise and cross-pollinate projects and to bring our expertise to where they can deliver a real value to the people we work with – and keep on trying to make the world a better place, one project at a time.

If you’d like to know more about what we can do for your organisation, in terms of data science, technology of biodiversity information, then drop me a line, call our offices on (08) 92277309 (Perth) or 0438 718 164 (Brisbane) or  strike up a conversation on our Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook pages.

Piers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mieke

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There was a fine range of symposia and discussion sessions to choose from. These annual conferences serve two purposes:

• to provide a forum for developing, refining, and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and
• to provide a showcase for biodiversity informatics – much of which relies on the standards created by TDWG and other organizations.

Data standards that describe and support the exchange of biodiversity information are critical scientific infrastructure. They enable data to be integrated in support of research, decision-making and conservation planning. Ultimately, standards extend the usability of data across taxa, scientific disciplines, and administrative boundaries.

Gaia Resources now has a long history of actively participating in TDWG. Having attended my first conference in Reading, UK in 1998, I became the Oceania representative from 2002-2008, and in the year I took my leave from that position Gaia Resources played a major role in helping host the conference in Fremantle, WA.

This year a small team here prepared an interesting case study for presentation in the conference session entitled “Avenues into integration: communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient”, organised by researchers from Arizona State University. Serge, Kehan, Jason and I worked on exploring ways of validating taxonomic names data embedded within environmental impact assessments and survey reports. This was spurred by two initiatives:

• the availability of a new and improved taxonomic names interrogator – GNfinder, that significantly improves the speed of finding and retrieving taxonomic name strings from a document with references to the Global Names Index, and
• the availability of IBSA – an open repository of environmental surveys in Western Australia.

The result was a small prototype we called ‘Species Informer’.

We created a procedure for uploading PDF documents, analysing taxonomic names, and then interrogating the Atlas of Living Australia for ancillary data for those names, such as local conservation status, in order to provide an automated summary of taxon names issues within each document for further analysis. We also ran a small test on image-only data using AWS Textract, to extract text from documents scanned as images to use as well.

Preliminary findings, from a small sample, included:

• gnfinder speeds the process of finding taxon names uttered in a document
• of course, it finds all taxon name mentions, not just the relevant ones for the survey
• we didn’t explore the gnfinder options for sensitivity, data source or context searching
• Species Informer produces a CSV report in c. 1 minute, as opposed to perhaps 8 hours for manual verification
• at a c. 90% success rate for finding taxon names in a report, environment officers still need to check the whole document
• not currently included in the Global Names Index are ‘phrase name taxa’ – c. 7% (1,143 of the 15,558) of the native vascular plant taxa in WA, and c. 15% (558 of the 3,782) of conservation taxa.

Some primary conclusions from this study included that ‘data governance’ is required at all parts of the process:

• preparing the source report to ensure all taxa are resolved
• the taxon names available to the Global Names Index could be expanded to include authenticated unpublished (phrase) names
• the regular maintenance of name currency, conservation status and child taxon information is necessary
  conservation status needs to be better maintained at regional, national, global levels.

The video of is now available so you can hear the presentation and see the detailed results of our study. In fact, I would commend all presentations for viewing as many innovative methods for communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient were presented.

If you’d like to know more about this project, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Funded by the Gordon Reid Foundation for Conservation (Lotterywest) and published jointly by The Wildflower Society of Western Australia (Inc.), Western Australian Herbarium (DBCA) and Kings Park and Botanic Garden, this book took seven years to complete.

Effectively a third edition of John Beard’s ‘Descriptive Catalogue’, this project aimed to score a standardised set of descriptive data for every vascular plant species then known to occur in the State – some 11,922 taxa in all.

By adopting TDWG’s Description Language for Taxonomy (DELTA) standard the project was able to flexibly produce both the printed content for the book and a simple interactive identification method within FloraBase.

It is worth noting that WA and Queensland, due to their mega-diversity and very active species discovery, have yet to produce complete State Floras, and while not a Flora in the strict sense, this work was the first time a full conspectus and identification tool for the WA’s vascular flora had been achieved.

Many hands worked on realising this work. Greg Keighery for nurturing the project after Dr Beard, the members of the Steering Committee – Dr Neville Marchant (Director, WA Herbarium), Dr Steve Hopper and Roger Fryer (Kings Park) and successive presidents of the Wildflower Society — Marion Blackwell, Tom Alford, John Robertson, Anne Holmes and Brian Moyle.

Tom Alford was invaluable throughout in the role of project chairperson, championing the data-based approach to information gathering, and tirelessly seeking funds to complete the project. Three wonderful people conscientiously gathered and codified the data from the Herbarium’s Census and Specimen datasets — Grazyna Paczkowska, Helen Coleman and Amanda Spooner, the latter who saw the book through publication and maintained the descriptive dataset for a further 8 years. And I cannot go without mentioning colleagues Nicholas Lander, Terry Macfarlane, Ben Richardson, Mike Choo and the sorely missed Paul Gioia, who all supported this innovative project.

The coded data from the publication was the last major piece of the FloraBase project to fit in place, integrating with the Names and Specimen data, images and maps and providing the first simple Statewide interactive key to the Western Australian flora. Twenty years later the available data is still working away, but there are now twelve years of data updates to be made. Time to get this project back on the rails with a further funding round!

You can read much more about this project in the book’s Introduction, available here: https://florabase.dpaw.wa.gov.au/publications/descat/.

As always, if you’d like to know more about this area, then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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Twenty World Heritage Areas are recognised in Australia by UNESCO for their unique cultural, geographical, and biological diversity. While these areas support outstanding universal values, they are under risk from disease, invasive species, and declining ecosystem processes. The speakers and panellists, drawn from the scientific community and on-the-ground conservation practitioners, discussed the benefits and challenges of integrating climate change and biodiversity knowledge in developing adaptive management plans to build more resilience in both species and ecosystems. They also clearly identified that existing ecological pressures are being exacerbated by a rapidly changing climate.

There were two featured speakers and five panellists discussing these pressing conservation issues – you can read more about each of them here.

Melinda Laidlaw, a Senior Ecologist with the Queensland Herbarium, gave a fascinating talk on a number of the decision tools employed for modelling past, current and future species habitats and investigating the impacts of climate change on the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area.

Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat across Queensland pre-clearing	Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat remaining as remnant vegetation in 2015
Source: State of the Environment – Queensland Department of Environment and Science.

 
Dave Newell, a Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University, spoke passionately about his work on understanding the ecology of endangered amphibians, most of which are narrow range endemics susceptible to climate change and disease impacts. Dave and his students’ work in the World Heritage rainforests of northern NSW over several decades has improved conservation outcomes for some of Australia’s most unique frogs.

Dave Newell – illustrating in more detail the process for modelling potential rainforest frog distributions

In response to audience questions, the panellists also discussed other threatening processes like extreme bushfire events and invasive diseases such as Myrtle Rust, the importance of new research into understanding the importance of ‘cloud water’ as a key survival strategy for some montane species, and the necessity of on-the-ground community coordination of conservation efforts.

I will add a link to the full webinar recording when it becomes available, or you will find it here in coming days.

The next webinar in this series is ‘Carbon sequestration & biodiversity: valuing & managing carbon-rich systems‘, scheduled for Tue, 13 October 2020 – I commend this series to you.

Species habitat modelling is an area I’ve long been interested in (I was a fairly early user of BIOCLIM in my work at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, too many years ago) and more recently wrote on the utility of using the Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL).

Gaia Resources has worked with another NESP Hub – Clean Air Urban Landscapes – in recent years to build their Urban Wildlife mobile app. If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources could work with you in this area, then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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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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Data standards that describe and support the exchange of biodiversity information are critical to scientific infrastructure. They enable data to be integrated in support of research, as well as decision-making and conservation planning. Ultimately, standards extend the usability of data across taxa, scientific disciplines, and administrative boundaries.

Current and previous TDWG data standards

The annual Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conferences serve two purposes:

• to provide a forum for developing, refining, and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and
• to provide a showcase for biodiversity informatics – much of which relies on the standards created by TDWG and other organisations.

Gaia Resources has been involved with this international standards body for some time, either utilising their data standards in various projects, developing modules for TDWG itself, or actively participating in their standards development.

While with the Western Australian Herbarium, I and other scientists worked on a number of TDWG standards (notably HISPID, ABCD, SDD and DELTA) and was the Oceania representative of TDWG for 6 years, culminating in hosting the 2008 annual conference in Fremantle, part-sponsored by Gaia Resources and Piers a valuable organising committee member.

This year’s virtual conference will be scheduled the week of October 19-23 and some of our team will be participating in various sessions. I would commend attending this conference if you’re keen to keep up with the latest work of this dedicated global community.

If you’d like to know more about Gaia Resources involvement and use of biodiversity information standards then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

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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

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I remain a research associate at the Western Australian Herbarium, both in order to continue my research into WA’s heaths – the Ericaceae – and to provide some institutional services.

One of these has been to collate and summarise significant changes in flora statistics from year to year, starting with the publication of the Descriptive Catalogue (Paczkowska and Chapman, 2000). This included a simple table of major floristic data, and a comparison with previous stats from the past century (updated here in Figure 1).

Exactly the same data was also used in a major paper comparing species richness and endemism in Mediterranean biomes (Beard, Chapman and Gioia, 2000). All this was made possible by my work with the greatly missed Paul Gioia, with whom I built the first statewide census database for vascular and cryptogamic flora – WACENSUS – begun in 1990. Of course, there were previously printed publications by John Green (1981, 1985) and maintained in supplement subsequently by Nicholas Lander, that provided the initial source data. The WACENSUS database, however, enabled real-time documentation of plant names in play for the State, and an immutable Life Science Identifier (LSID) that could be referred to across information systems.

In that time, we have seen the flora statistics document a steady increase in the number of species, both published and ‘putative’ (i.e. manuscript and phrase-name taxa), grow steadily (Figure 2).

2020 marks a number of milestones for the State’s documentation of our precious and unique flora:

• the 50th anniversary of the first edition of Nuytsia – WA’s systematic botany journal, that provides much of the published taxonomic work describing and classifying the States’ flora;
• 30 years since ‘the Census’ became a functional database underpinning authoritative, accurate and an up-to-date source for plant names in current use (and their synonyms) in WA;
• 20 years since ‘The Western Australian Flora – A Descriptive Catalogue’ was published, from which the descriptive query capacity of FloraBase was drawn;
• 20 years since the last major analysis of the uniqueness of our State’s flora (especially with regards to other Mediterranean floras of the world);
• 17 years since the last major revision of ‘FloraBase — the Western Australian Flora’ was released.

In the intervening years, Paul Gioia worked to manually integrate the Western Australian Museum’s faunal names into the Census as well, in order to maximise that knowledge in his major work – NatureMap (2007 onwards). As a result, WA has a standardised names dataset for much of the biota of the state.

It is very heartening to me to see the development of the next generation of WA’s biodiversity information systems through the work of the newly-funded Biodiversity Information Office – see last week’s post.

Yesterday, I received the 2019-20 flora statistics data, from which I will extract the significant highlights and changes for the past year. This complex report was only automated (after years of testing for veracity against my manually-calculated version) in 2019. Again, this could not have been achieved without the dedicated work of Paul Gioia, Ben Richardson and the invaluable curatorial team at the WA Herbarium. These results will be published in FloraBase in coming weeks.

UPDATE: The 2020 flora statistics are now available.

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

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Discovering Biodiversity: A decadal plan for taxonomy and biosystematics in Australia and New Zealand 2018–2027

discover and document all remaining Australian species of plants, animals, fungi and other organisms … in a generation.

The Decadal Plan for Taxonomy and Biosystematics in Australia and New Zealand (2018–2027) recommended 22 strategic actions grouped under six key initiatives. Together, these provide a vision for the future that would see a substantial acceleration in the discovery and documentation of the Australasia’s biodiversity.

​​Taxonomy Australia is developing more detailed implementation plans for each of these strategic actions, in consultation with the taxonomy and biosystematics sector and with key stakeholders, of which this forum was a part.

The video introduction runs you through the the scope and intent of the national workshop, and these wrap-up videos outline the results of the ten ambitious roundtable discussion groups.

In the first stage of synthesis from these roundtables deliberations a list of action items was distilled:

• build a collaboration space that combines an expertise directory (online register of taxonomists), a portal for shared field work, and a clearing-house mechanism to connect citizen scientists and scientists for taxonomic projects and a coordinated recognition system for citizen science contributions to taxonomy,
• streamline the permitting process in every state to reduce the burden on collectors applying for permits,
• start writing shorter, faster morphological descriptions,
• agree on a controlled name-space for informal species (Operational Taxonomic Units),
• create a new specialised journal for rapid taxonomic description and publication,
• reach community consensus on how to integrate molecular and morphological data, especially when they conflict,
• measure the economic value of our collections (independently from their replacement cost),
• design collections now for years 5, 10 and 25 years of our mission, and
• start including funding for collections activities in grant applications.

These actions are promising and we commend the efforts of Taxonomy Australia. Taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying, is a global practice; species are not confined by regional boundaries and so taxonomists work to describe new species in their family of expertise, wherever they are found. Therefore, coordination at a national level to discern and describe new taxa benefits all the component states.

Much of this nationally-coordinated taxonomic effort will streamline the work of Western Australia’s recently announced Biodiversity Information Office (BIO)​ not least because, in such a biodiverse State, there remain so many species yet to be discovered, described, and their conservation status assessed.

The transformation pathway to digital assessment at a bioregional scale (courtesy WABSI)

WABSI also led the establishment of the Index of Biodiversity Surveys for Assessments (IBSA), launched in May 2018, in conjunction with the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, as a publicly accessible repository that captures and consolidates data from more than 500 biodiversity surveys each year.  Again, Gaia Resources has been involved – our work on streamlining the lodgement of assessments within the Environmental Impact Assessment project has also been launched.

And in late 2019, the Prime Minister announced progress towards a nationally consistent digital environmental assessment and approvals regime, in partnership with Western Australia. You can read more on this in the Digitally Transforming Environmental Assessment report.

Through the development of these projects, as well as shared data repositories and the establishment of the WA’s ‘Environment Online’ digital portal, the State is rapidly developing a comprehensive framework for biodiversity assessment. Taxon names, to return to the start, are the fundamental key to integrating, maintaining and reliably using these amassed datasets. In fact, they drive the whole ‘data ecosystem’.

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 Current biodiversity initiatives in Australia appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Yet, it has traditionally been the scientific paper that takes precedence as the vector for knowledge, with its core data relegated to a few tables locked into print format. The bulk of the collected data is left in lab books, spreadsheets and analysis software formats in the scientist’s office, or at best as supplementary digital data tables on the journal’s website.

What happens at the two ends of a scientific project can be the most critical. Once a ‘research question’ has been proposed, defining what data must be collected and the methods that ensure rigour and accuracy of recording data become paramount. Poor project design can kill a project. Likewise, once ‘the paper’ is out, where does the data go?

Data capture is increasingly being aided by automation, such as sensors that measure one parameter accurately, repeatedly and automatically submitting the data points to the scientist digitally. Smartphone apps are now commonly used to improve the accuracy of observations by providing their users with accurate automated data on geo-location and date/time, as well as controlled vocabularies for each form field.

Submitted data is then stored in a project data repository where administrators can vet, validate, curate and download data for further analysis. While the project is active the data is maintained; but, once the paper is out and the research funds dry up? In the figure above, the ideal ‘life cycle’ is illustrated.

Nature Science Data provides a best practice model for projects that result in a scientific publication. It mandates the release of datasets with accompanying Data Descriptors, instructs authors to submit datasets to an appropriate public data repository, and maintains a list of vetted data repositories.

To make the data maximally retrievable and reusable, (globally) agreed data standards are crucial. One example from the biological realm is the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), a non-profit scientific community dedicated to developing biodiversity data standards.

In my neck of the science woods, herbarium and museum collections provide an excellent long-term store of absolutely raw data, in the form of a preserved specimen from which multiple researchers over time can extract useful data. With the digitisation revolution in recent decades this fundamental biodiversity has been captured and liberated through institutional websites (eg. FloraBase – the Western Australian Flora) and federated to provide national (Atlas of Living Australia) and global (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) data portals.

For example, as part of UWA’s honey bee project I scored phenological data for a eucalypt species complex using Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) standard fields. This data was appended to metadata in the WA Herbarium’s specimen database to become available to researchers around the world.

So, a clearly conceived Data Management Plan should be essential for any scientific research and Citizen Science projects are no different. However, CS projects commonly have a very low funding base, run for just a relatively short period and may be related to a single researcher’s project for which the outcome is a thesis or paper. If a project ends and the digital datasets are not adequately archived in a useable format in a major searchable repository then that hard-won data cannot be maximally discoverable and re-usable.

A good fall-back in this situation would be to at least lodge the data and metadata in the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS aims to make Australia’s research data assets more valuable for researchers, research institutions and the nation. The site contains many guides to standards, methods and contribution – and is well-worth referring to when considering your next research project.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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I’m generally not a fan of unpaid internships, as it smacks a bit of exploitation. However, the Work In Learning program is actually part of the coursework for a student, and it has very clear guidelines about how it should run and what the student should provide. I was reluctant, but we decided to trial our participation in this through programs delivered through Edith Cowan University and the University of Western Australia.

We’ve had three students working with us on this program, Yenty and Kaelyn from Edith Cowan University, and Kasun from the University of Western Australia. All three of these students bring very different skillsets to us from their studies.

Yenty has been working with us on Machine Learning (ML) and business opportunities. Yenty has developed a report for us about this topic and has been doing some reviews and informing our staff of some new things around the ML sphere. She’s uncovered some interesting opportunities and also some latent relevant skills in our staff that we had forgotten about!

Meanwhile, Kaelyn has been talking to us about marketing strategies. Her interest was in this area, so she developed a draft marketing plan that gives us a different perspective around how we are seen – especially valuable in the marketing area – and proposed a bunch of things to do about it.

Kasun has just started with us, and he is working on setting up some actual ML processes using the Amazon Web Services stack. As we’re a partner with AWS, we’ve got great access to their team, and they have been supporting Kasun (and us) in this venture to trial out a few ideas and research concepts that have been bubbling away for a while.

I’m always looking for ways to support my old alma mater!

The Work In Learning program is a limited investment from the student – 100 hours of time, strictly controlled through timesheets – and with a clear plan up-front and a clear output at the end, so it’s been quite easy to stay involved and engaged with the students. Of course, the quality of the outcome is very much dependent on the quality of the student!

The program delivers benefits in two ways that I can see:

• for the business, it gives you a fresh pair of eyes to look at a particular problem or issue, and this can be seen as an ongoing extended way to actually get to know potential new staff for the business, and
• for the student, it gives them a taste of what it’ll be like in the real world after the graduate, and just like for the business, it’s a way for them to get to know a future employer.

We’re looking at what value the Work In Learning program delivered to us as a business at the moment, and will be working with the University coordinators in due course to give them our feedback on how the program could be reviewed and improved before we look at participating again in 2020. If you want to know more about how it went, feel free to drop me a line at piers.higgs@gaiaresources.com.au or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

In the meantime, we wish the three of our students – Kaelyn, Kasun and Yenty – the best of luck in the future and thank them for their time and insights!

Piers

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