Looking back

To say that 2020 was not the year that anybody expected is probably an understatement.

The COVID-19 pandemic was certainly the focus of the last year, and we spent a lot of time within Gaia Resources making sure of two things – that we looked after our team (physically and mentally), and we still kept the business operating on an even keel.

Starting from way back in March, we kicked in our Coronavirus response, which was to keep our staff physically safe, and when the lockdowns began, we trialled and then implemented our Business Continuity Plan and had the whole team working from home. While this “physical health” arrangement went into practice across all three of our offices in Perth, Brisbane and Darwin, and then we doubled down on the “mental health” aspects, increasing the frequency of our planned online interactions .

We then started to work towards the way forward, keeping up our connectivity, changing up our office space (and in Brisbane’s case, moving completely), and making sure we kept to the health guidelines for each State we operated in. All this was also based on as much evidence as we could get from the team from our internal monitoring.

In looking back at the six months since then, even with our best efforts, we had staff that became isolated and run down during the virus. It feels very much like we staggered over the line to the Christmas/New Year break period, but we did make it, and we learned a lot that we are implementing into the new year (more on that later). Our internal monitoring has been fantastic to learn from as we went, and we now know what we should monitor into the future, too – but hopefully, we won’t need to do that.

Speaking of staff, we also hired a bunch of people during the year – including Billy, Rory, Sara, Gus, Tania, Tawanda, Sarah, Shushma, Marion and Jeff. We have a bit of updating to do on our “Staff” page as an early task this year!

With all these new team members, it’s no surprise that in the last year we saw some amazing milestones delivered in the very difficult circumstances we described earlier. Along with passing our annual ISO certification with flying colours, the project highlights included:

• Transforming the Queensland State Archives by implementing a new Archival Management System ecosystem
• Improving the way in which data comes into the Western Australian environmental impact assessment process through a new portal for the Index of Biodiversity Surveys for Assessment
• Updating the Essential Services Volunteer app to help support our volunteer firefighters
• Delivering the Q-Album project for Queensland State Archives
• Releasing a new fire mapping plugin for QGIS, which will assist a wide variety of organisations managing the land across the north of Australia
• Releasing Retromaps – a way to view our historical maps and to better understand the history of Perth

There are a number of other projects that we’re still working on or are yet to formally launch or announce – so there will be plenty of things to announce as we proceed with this new year.

Looking forward

Our forward plan for the new year revolves around five key points, which we are implementing through a program that stretches across the first six months of the year. This focuses on:

• Revising our corporate structures to cope with our growth,
• Focusing on improving our communication with each other,
• Continuing to improve our processes,
• Upgrading a range of our various operational technology stacks, and
• Ensuring we remain environmentally sustainable.

Gaia Resources 2019-20 carbon emissions, by type

To enlarge on the last one, a month or so ago we provided an update on our efforts to become even more environmentally sustainable and this included becoming an accredited Carbon Neutral company as well as becoming a partner with the ClimateClever team to support our team to become more environmentally sustainable at home. This is a big part of our rollout for the new year, where we will also be looking at keeping our carbon footprint as low as possible, and including some new initiatives that will include our clients as well.

2020 wasn’t the year we thought it would be, but we’ve made the best of it wherever we can, learned from it, and are ready to come back even stronger in 2021. It’s certainly going to be another “interesting” year ahead – but I for one can’t wait to see the efforts we’re putting in bear fruit.

In the meantime, stay safe, happy and healthy and get in touch if you’d like to chat about any of these initiatives via connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Piers

The post Welcome back! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Firstly, we are now a carbon neutral company, thanks to the analysis and offsetting that we have done via Carbon Neutral. This means that the carbon emissions that we produced as a byproduct of our operations is being offset through the use of Gold Standard certified offsets – which in our case means biodiverse planting in the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor in Western Australia (around 400km north of Perth).

Gaia Resources 2019-20 carbon emissions, by type

As you can see from our summary graph from the assessment report (shown on the right), our carbon dioxide emissions totalled up to 38.03 tonnes, across a range of different areas, but primarily from our commutes to work and our air travel (which we offset through the airlines own carbon offset approaches).

This whole “commuting” part made us think more broadly around our emissions, and especially so in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had our teams working primarily from home.  When thinking about carbon emissions under this new way of working, we realised that there was a positive to this – this means that our “staff commuting” total has certainly reduced.  However, at the same time, our staff are actually at home more than they are usually, so there must also be some more emissions produced there that we also are at least partially responsible for.

Hence our second initiative – we became a partner with ClimateClever, in order to assist our staff in managing their own home emissions – and through this we have purchased each of our staff a membership to the Home version of the app.  We discuss a bit more of the detail behind the reasons why we went down this path with the ClimateClever team in an article that you can find over on their LinkedIn page.

ClimateClever’s approach is a three-step process – Measure, Examine and Action. Through this approach, our team can first Measure what their carbon footprint is (and compare it with others, including amongst our team), then undertake an Audit in their own homes to see what they have in place, and finally, take real and positive Action to systematically reduce their carbon footprint.  You can see how this works in the ClimateClever introduction video, embedded below.

Our team are steadily working through their Measure stage of the process, working through their home bills and finding ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and to make the world just a little bit better.

These are just the first two new initiatives that you will see coming from us over the 2020-21 Financial year that relate to our environmental sustainability.  For example, we are working on new policies – for example, to reduce that air travel component as much as possible through virtual meetings – and we have several new initiatives to get our clients involved in this journey towards carbon neutrality.

Of course, our existing policies don’t change – including small actions such as purchasing sustainable office products (like our new pens, which are primarily made from wheat waste), to much larger ones, like choosing Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider because of their commitment to achieving 100% renewable energy.

In summing up, I think I said it best in the ClimateClever piece:

Making these changes is important to me, it’s important for our staff, it’s important for their children – and it’s important for our planet.  Without those things, we don’t have a company.  So it is obvious for me personally, and for our company collectively, that action needs to be taken.

These sorts of approaches are all why I used the word “Gaia” in our business name – to remind us that we’re all part of the same complex system that is this planet and we need to think holistically about how we improve our part in that system.

Throughout the rest of this financial year, we will be implementing more ways to make the world a better place through our sustainability strategy, and we will be inviting our clients and suppliers to come on this journey with us. If you’d like to know more, then get in touch with me directly, and let’s make a difference together.

Piers

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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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Using the cloud is a greener alternative. The great thing about this solution, is that you are only burning energy and creating carbon when your infrastructure is being used. No servers whining away in the back room burning dinosaur juice while it waits for its next task – there is no idle time. The cloud processing goes and does someone else’s work if you have nothing for it to do. This leads to Cloud Server Farms being more efficient than having your own data centre. Other benefits of green computing are:

• reduced environmental impact (less Greenhouse gas emissions, less e-waste, fewer virgin resources needed for manufacturing new devices)
• lower energy costs
• longer lasting computing devices
• reduced health risk for computer workers and recyclers

To focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – their infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the median of surveyed US enterprise data centres. Factor in the carbon intensity of consumed electricity and renewable energy purchases and AWS performs the same task with an 88% lower carbon footprint.

Carbon efficiency of AWS infrastructure. Source: (see 451 Research)

AWS has multiple initiatives to get to these numbers, such as changing how they use water for cooling the servers, utilising technologies like evaporative cooling, recycled water or onsite water treatment. In fact, AWS claims to be working to achieve Amazon’s goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025.

This is no small feat considering the amount of processing they have all over the world. To get to this lofty goal here in Australia, Amazon’s first renewable energy project is a 60-megawatt solar farm anticipated to come online in 2021 in northern New South Wales. Once complete, the project is expected to generate 142,000-megawatt hours – nearly the amount for 23,000 average Australian households. A second 105-megawatt plant is also in development east of Newcastle in NSW.

AWS solar farms in Australia. Source: AWS

To sum up, servers, storage and computational power are essential to, and a cost of, business. By using AWS, Gaia Resources is looking to honour our motto and ensure we get the job done in a greener and cost-effective way, providing stable and practical solutions for any size of project.

You may be interested in some further reading on this topic. And if you’d like to know more, feel free to reach out and see what Gaia can do for you in this rapidly emerging space. Comment below, contact me at angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

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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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Over four sessions presentations were given by researchers from Science, Agriculture, Business and Law faculties at WA’s universities as well as practitioners in the arenas of farming, catchment management, policy and conservation. Briefly, the subject topics covered included:

1. Climate change science –

• Setting the context with the latest science in a range of environmental and human health areas, and
• Specific figures on our State’s current and projected emissions with respect to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement.

2. Legal and policy perspectives from both carbon export and import countries –

• Case studies from Australian and Canadian exporters, and
• Chinese imports of Australian LNG: Implications for Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGe), including proposal options for an Emissions Trading Scheme and transparency and national standards required for effective monitoring, reporting and verification.

3. Opportunities for a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy, such as –

• Livestock industries need for a combination of methane mitigation, vegetation management and offset strategies, and
• Consideration of GHGe to achieve net zero GHGe economy look likely to change the nature of Environmental Impact Assessment practice as we know it and currently practice it.

Of all the valuable information and analysis presented during this seminar, the following two graphs (Figure 1) spoke to just how big the task ahead is for us collectively in Western Australia.

Figure 1. These two graphs illustrate how WA’s GHGe’s are tracking with reference to Australia’s 2030 Paris Agreement commitments. (These figures, presented at the seminar, are taken with permission from the forthcoming Conservation Council of WA publication ‘CCWA & Clean State Report: September 2019’.)

Australia’s international commitment under the Paris Agreement requires pollution to be reduced by 26-28% from the 2005 baseline year. But current and proposed projects since 2005 are predicted to add 41.6 million tonnes of pollution per year, equivalent to a 61% increase on WA’s 2005 emissions baseline, and an 8% increase above Australia’s 2005 baseline.  WA’s energy minister has previously said the State would have an “aspirational” target of net zero emissions by 2050 and acknowledged the federal government’s 26%-28% reduction target by 2030 and would commit to “working with the commonwealth to achieve this goal”.

There’s clearly a lot of improvements to be had and we’re keen to find ways we can make a positive difference.

As an environmental technology company, Gaia Resources keeps abreast of current trends. As our mission statement says:

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

We work on big data projects in areas like biodiversity, health and the environment – you can see this in the scope of our project portfolio. As a good corporate citizen, Gaia Resources applies a “core values test” to all projects that are proposed to us, to see if the projects will “make the world a better place”.  Certainly, working with companies to reduce their carbon emissions has a big part to play in making that improvement!

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the issues presented here, or want to know how we can help with tracking, monitoring and reducing carbon emissions, 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 A Carbon Budget for Western Australia appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The key reference binding these two events was the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals at the core of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals

NatureLink Perth is a relatively new initiative hosted by Murdoch Unversity that aims to provide a hub for collaboration between diverse stakeholders to integrate nature into our city, sustain our world-class biodiversity, and provide a healthy, liveable city that benefits the economy, environment and its people.

The NatureLink Perth Symposium 2019 was held on the 4 July in the Kim Beazley Lecture Theatre at Murdoch University. The Symposium provided collaborative space to discuss efforts to enable nature-sensitive urban design and nurture a biodiverse, liveable city. It was attended by a diverse set of stakeholders, with some 202 registered participants including 83 organisations, and provided many opportunities for networking and input on the key goals and challenges.

Direct engagement and input from attendees using an interactive presentation platform was an excellent and efficient method for immediately capturing audience responses and feedback for later reference and sharing. Five key issues were presented and formed the basis of the panel discussions at the core of the day (each with a lead panelist).

Planning: How can State and Local Governments work together to better integrate biodiversity and green-space into planning at all levels? (Renata Zelinova, WALGA) Fire Management: What are the conflicting elements of bushfire management and biodiversity conservation? How can we balance them to benefit both? (Tim McNaught, DFES) Community Awareness: What facilities, education and community engagement programs should we target to better connect people with nature and sustain biodiversity? (Carmen Lawrence, CCWA/UWA) Design Implementation: What are the challenges in getting approval for nature sensitive urban design and how can we improve design regulations to mainstream it? (Chris Green, UDIA) Biodiversity Audit: What are the critical information gaps in biodiversity info and how can we obtain the information needed and collect it innovatively? (Richard Hobbs, UWA)

Five NatureLink focus areas

After the extended discussion session, where some quite passionate statements from both panellists and audience about clearing for development, loss of species, habitat and expertise, and the need to integrate and liberate knowledge, attendees were asked to indicate what they considered their top three priorities. The resulting graph, from 118 individuals, is shown below – improving planning and building regulation were considered key priorities, as was increased community awareness, engagement and advocacy.

Naturelink panel discussion – top three priorities

In the afternoon session we heard from a number of the brilliant young NatureLink interns, most about to complete their studies, as well as local case studies on nature projects – Cockburn Community Wildlife Corridor (Sue Marsh), Saving Urban Turtles (Anthony Santoro, Murdoch U.), and Piney Lakes design trends (Kelly Fowler, City of Melville). The final keynote by Tom Hatton (EPA) was an inspiring call to listen to and work with the next generation, for the future. The take-home message to me was that local actions are the only real way to achieve global outcomes.

The immediate outcome of the symposium for the NatureLink team was to how to move into their collaborative phase using the information provided at the symposium. A precis of these considerations by this smaller workshop was distributed.

The following day I attended a morning session on The Circular Economy, organised by the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC) and hosted by the WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIWA). The ‘Circular Economy’ is a strategy for changing the way to produce, assemble, sell and use products to minimise waste and to reduce environmental impact, while being advantageous to business by maximising the use of valuable resources and contributing to innovation, growth and job creation. The graphic at right simply illustrates the key difference between a linear and circular economy. The keynote speaker proposed that to the ‘4 Rs’ of Return, Reuse, Repair and Recycle can be added a fifth – Re-form.

Linear vs Circular economies

The keynote speaker was Professor Veena Sahajwalla, Director of the UNSW SMaRT Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology. Veena and her team are working closely with industry partners to deliver the new science, processes and technologies that will drive the redirection of many of the world’s most challenging waste streams away from landfills and back into production; simultaneously reducing costs to alleviating pressures on the environment.

She is reimagining the global supply chain by demonstrating the viability of ‘mining’ our overburdened landfills to harness the wealth of useful elements like carbon, hydrogen and materials like silica, titania and metals embedded in our waste. One of the key elements to this vision is the implementation of smart micro-factories that can operate on a site as small as 50 square metres and can be located wherever waste may be stockpiled.

To round out this line of thought about “thinking global, acting local”, I happened to read an article the following day entitled Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option. While it looked at a range of planetary-scale technologies for ameliorating global warming, it ended with a very local solution, which made me reflect on the way nature and human technology can co-exist in the future world. Here’s one quote from the article to finish.

In fact, natural regrowth is usually better than planting, since “allowing nature to choose which species predominate during natural regeneration allows for local adaptation and higher functional diversity,” says Robin Chazdon, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut. A study published in March by 87 researchers, including Chazdon, concluded that “secondary forests recover remarkably fast” with 80 percent of their species typically back in 20 years and 100 percent in 50 years.

It looks like it could be a win-win, delivering a climate payoff on the scale of geoengineering without any of the downsides. Tim Lenton of Exeter University, a proponent of research into geoengineering, says it could be an ideal solution. “I am against introducing new forcings such as sulphate aerosol injection in the stratosphere,” he says. “But I am in favor of emulating and enhancing natural feedback loops and cycles, such as regenerating degraded forests.”

It would, he says, strengthen the biosphere’s natural forces of self-regulation that British scientist James Lovelock has termed Gaia. Lenton has a new term for what is required. Not geoengineering, but Gaia-engineering.

If you’d like to talk about how our Gaia-software-engineering can help with your environmental projects or about any of the ideas presented here, then leave a comment below, start a chat with me via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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In a very simplistic overview, “the cloud” is someone else’s computing hardware, provided for your use as a service.  This approach to service provision now provides a range of things – distributed storage, virtual machines, backups, email services, serverless processes, machine learning and all sorts of other services (more than you can imagine, as listed here by Amazon Web Services).  Anyway, the cloud has transformed the way that many businesses operate, and we’ve been embracing  aspects of this here at Gaia Resources for quite some time now.

Gaia Resources used to operate – and this is mainly because of my own decision – in a totally self-sufficient environment.  I had a lot of fun over ten years ago setting up hardware and a new Microsoft Exchange server internally, and it became the backbone for our authentication, email, calendar and other services.  Along the way we have had a range of staff with some form of sysadmin or networking experience and skills, and through their efforts, we built up a small internal server farm to handle our internal requirements.  However, this came at a cost; we had staff that had to manage these servers, which meant that they weren’t working on ‘chargeable’ projects… and I was still getting my hands dirty doing some sysadmin duties (“Just hold down the power button for five seconds, she’ll be right”…).

A typical day in my previous career as a sysadmin

Eventually, we realised we were to some degree becoming slaves to the systems we had implemented.  These systems (and the hardware they ran on) needed to be managed, maintained and updated.  While we still use some of these systems today – like our internal timesheeting system – others, like Zimbra Collaboration Server, have now been decommissioned.  I’ve got to admit, while I miss some parts of the sysadmin I used to do, I certainly don’t miss being on call – those dashes to the office to deal with servers weren’t much fun.

We’ve moved into using Google’s G Suite for much of our ‘backbone’ now; including email, calendar, and some of their other apps.  This comes at a direct financial cost – which is ridiculously low in comparison to salaries for staff to manage internal systems (and my late night/early morning/weekend dashes in to the office to reset servers).  The tradeoff is that we can’t make all the changes we want to, we need to have a decent internet connection and we are just a touch reliant on the big players being good corporate citizens.  With our team being spread across the country (with the team in Brisbane and Chris now up in Darwin), we’re also actively using a range of collaboration tools for our team that also use use the cloud in some form (e.g. Meet and Skype).

Another area that we’ve moved into has been using cloud based infrastructure for our projects.  Here, I’m specifically talking about our use of Amazon Web Services (AWS).  We’ve implemented a very large number of projects in AWS infrastructure since we started using it, and have just reached the Standard tier of AWS partnership.  Back in the day when we bought physical hardware for our servers, we set it up using the Hostaway data centre.  Hostaway have been a crucial part of our success as a business, and their green data center was particularly inspiring (but not on the same scale that AWS are doing!).

Providing scalable, flexible infrastructure is not a trivial undertaking.  If you are managing your own hardware, then to scale up and down requires a lot of effort; upgrades, maintenance and the like all become potential weights that can slow down your business.  Hence, we shifted to using AWS as a default infrastructure provider for our projects.  This was confirmed through a range of good responses we’ve had to working with them (as compared to their competition), and indeed by doing some research into their practices to reduce their (global!) environmental impact.  This is a big part of the evaluation that we make when we look at new things at Gaia Resources.

Even with these environmental benefits, one thing that you do need to be careful of is the costs.  With services costing a small amount each month, they seem very attractive, but a lot of small charges can quickly start to add up.  As you spec out the architecture for a project (either for your business, or for your clients), you can find the infrastructure costs can actually make – and break – projects.  This is an experience that you need to enter into with very open eyes, a short leash, and a firm grasp on your wallet.  The more of these projects we’ve run, the more we’ve become very aware of this, and have a bunch of ways to make it work for our clients.

Keeping an eye on your costs using Cloud services takes a bit of planning

So, we’ve embraced cloud services for many of our internal systems, and we also use cloud providers for our project infrastructure as well.  And while we’ve had a few bumps along the way, generally these have turned out to be good things for us as a business, for our clients and for the environment.  Feel free to tell us your stories of using cloud computing – or ask us how we can help you – via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

* Believe it or not, I started writing this article, based on the environmental benefits of cloud computing, back in 2017!

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Previously, we blogged about some work we did for Independence Group NL around the work we did on developing systems and procedures around the management of their disturbance and rehabilitation reporting requirements to the environmental regulator. That project was all about Data Curation, probably what I’d nominate as the second step of the chain – curation of the data.  In simple terms there is a three step process for a lot of data projects, namely:

This previous project was all about making sure the data was curated well. What about the other two steps?

In terms of delivering data, proponents are reporting based on either the need to do an Annual Environmental Report (AER), and/or for the Mining and Rehabilitation Fund (MRF).  Both of these have specific reporting requirements, and the AERs under the Mining Act 1978 are now being submitted online through the EARS2 system (the same system for the MRF lodgement, too). For other AERs under the Environmental Protection Act 1986, there’s also the need to submit a data package and the transition period for that approach is ending soon, too – so that will shortly be mandatory.  As we talked about back in 2017, these sorts of online systems are really starting to streamline the data submission process, and the assessment processes.

Recently, we worked with a mining client to focus on the Data Delivery end of the process, in terms of assessing what they needed to produce – creating some tables that outlined just what data they needed to use.  This project had some challenges, mainly due to issues in the data curation step – their data needed quite a bit of work to make sure that the values made sense at the end.  One of the things we strive for is accurate reporting on these sorts of datasets.  It’s difficult to be accurate if there are issues in the underlying data, and this is often caused by operators not knowing about such seemingly unimportant things as topology (which is why Jake wrote the previous blog about that subject).  There are some other things to consider as well in this curation step – for example, making sure that your disturbance polygons are tagged with the same categories that are used in the AER and MRF reporting templates is a must!

Once you have the data prepared you can then do all sorts of things to automate the reporting of the data.  In one of our recent projects, we’ve been developing models in ArcGIS that can spit out the data in the right formats ready for compilation into the reporting forms.  In historical projects, we’ve also prepared the reports ourselves (including a wide range of illustrative maps) and done a fair bit of work in that area manually.  But as the systems like EARS2 evolve, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see a scenario where data is submitted through even more real-time methods, which will be a real challenge for all concerned!

The Data Collection piece remains one that we’re still working on pretty heavily, and that’s still a manual process for most groups.  This might entail taking GPS readings, or digitising from imagery (including drone, aerial photography and satellite imagery).  We’ve done a few projects attempting to automate the classification of disturbance from imagery over the years, in cooperation with Universities and other research groups, and there is still some way to go to get an all-singing, all-dancing solution here.  With the development of other tools like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, though, there are some really good ideas floating about that we’re working on to see what we can do in that space in the future.

So, disturbance mapping and reporting can be as manual as someone wandering around a site, taking some GPS co-ordinates and then working with spatial data and Excel reports to deliver on their regulatory requirements.  But in the future, this automation will mean that a site enviro will be able to focus their time on reviewing the outputs and results, rather than doing the work themselves – freeing them up to deal with other site issues and to make sure other commitments are met.

In principle, that should mean a better outcome for the environment, which is why we do what we do.

Piers

P.S. If you are interested in how we can help you with this sort of automation, then feel free to get in touch directly via email, on (08) 92277309, or by starting a conversation on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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In previous years for our Christmas winddown we have have been to the movies to watch the latest Star Wars film and then head to a nearby pub for a few drinks.  That was reasonably popular, until we had our launch ‘do’ last year where we went to the Mount Lawley Bowls club for a bit of barefoot bowling and barbeque, which went down as one of the best events we’ve done.

Our Mount Lawley bowls event was a popular one with the team

I asked around discreetly, and listened to a few conversations here and there to hear a few common themes came up from the team about what would be a good event;

• They wanted to do something that had us all doing something together,
• They wanted to do something that made a difference, and
• There needed to be some unwinding and perhaps a beverage or two.

One of my original aims in starting Gaia Resources – which remains true to this day – was to support active on-ground conservation work.  Mostly, we are able to do this indirectly through discounts and in-kind work on our technology projects, but I realised that this Christmas function presented an opportunity to move closer to that aim.  I thought we could volunteer for one of the conservation groups that operate along the beaches, do some volunteering, then hit the water for a swim before we then sat down to a late lunch.

I contacted Perth NRM (as you can do through their Corporate Volunteering page) to find out if any of the Coastcare groups would be willing to take us on as volunteers for the last working day of the year for a couple of hours.  It turned out there were plenty of groups that were willing to help out, right up and down the coast of Perth. So we had a few to pick from which was great to have that opportunity!

So all I had left to do was to work out where to have lunch.  Being the spatial creature that I am, I did a quick scan of the Coastcare groups areas, where the team live, where there was public transport, and that seemed to point towards Cottesloe.  After a few calls to the potential places there, we ended up settling on a really good deal with the cBlu restaurant, part of the iconic Ocean Beach Hotel.  Once that was booked, I let Adeline and the Cottesloe Coastcare team know we were ready to head down.

To be honest, the hardest part was finding the lunch venue!

We arrived down at Cottesloe in various ways (mostly public transport, though), and were met by the Coastcare volunteers who gave us a run down on the Grant Marine Park, the efforts that they have put in over the years on that area.  After a bit of a safety briefing, we all grabbed our gloves and got stuck into the tasks lined up for us;

• Watering the plants that had been planted over the cooler months, to get them through summer,
• Weeding the area, picking out the seed heads of the weeds that were present in the area so that they didn’t sit in the seed bank ready for the winter rains,
• Collecting any seeds for the native plants that they wanted to grow more of (they have been collecting, propagating and replanting from within that reserve in a great display of keeping the right provenance for the reserve), and
• Picking up any litter we could find, to get that removed from the area.

So without further ado – here we are in action:

The Coastcare co-ordinators and the volunteers went out of their way to make it a really great and productive few hours for them, and we really enjoyed it.  They even provided a bunch of morning tea treats for us to have, which was fantastic! One of the quotes that stuck in my mind was when I was talking to one of their team that said “your team in two hours is going to deliver a lot more for the reserve than we can do in a day”.  It really made me think about how even these little acts can make a difference.

After the cleanup, we helped tidy everything away with the team (we were pretty much out of things to do, as we’d watered, weeded, picked and cleaned up the whole reserve) and grabbed our team photo:

Gaia Resources Perth team – yes, that’s an epic Christmas rashie Sean is wearing

The swim at North Cottesloe Beach afterwards was a great way to cool down, clean off and get ready for the afternoon’s festivities at cBlu – but that’s just a boring old lunch and a few drinks compared to the morning of making a difference.

I can totally recommend looking to your local Coastcare, Landcare or other volunteer group enough for your staff events.  We made a big different to that little reserve in a small number of hours, and it was a great way to give back to our environment and our community.  We’ll be looking to make these more regular occurrences around the place for our teams, and we’re also going to start tracking them in our own GRID instance so we can see what sort of positive difference we make as a team to our environment directly – not just through our technology projects.

If you want to know more about how your teams can help groups like Cottesloe Coastcare, then either get in touch with them directly, or contact groups like Perth NRM to see how you can help.

We head into the new year with a real drive to make a difference, and I can’t wait to see what else we can do in 2019.

Piers

The post Giving back to the Environment appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Ten years – 1,873 trees planted!

Over the break we’ll be on skeleton staff in our Perth office, but the Brisbane team will be away for the whole period – stay tuned for a couple of exciting announcements around both our offices when we return in the new year, though!  If there are any support requests or issues that you have then please use our support email address – support@gaiaresources.com.au – and the team members who are in the office will get in touch with you on one of the non-public holidays.

We usually take this opportunity to reflect on the year to date, as we are halfway through our usual reporting cycle of the financial year.  It’s certainly been one of the most challenging and interesting calendar years for us, with staff changes and some of the largest projects we’ve won kicking off (which we’re still not allowed to talk about publicly, but stay tuned for those announcements in the new year as well).

Gaia Resources has changed a lot since we started almost 15 years ago, from a tiny little home office through to the team we have today, with two offices and 25 staff.  The beast has grown quite a bit bigger than even I thought it would, but these vast uncharted territories are full of excitement and opportunity – this year has been no exception.

We asked the team what their wins were for 2019, and the list is pretty nice to reflect back on:

• Working on the Public Records Office of Victoria project – a great team including a great client,
• Building the Brisbane team up into a “real” office,
• Working collaboratively with our clients to reduce their anxiety levels around the Agile process, so that they are now looking forward to starting sprints instead of being concerned about how this will all play out,
• Running the training in Archivematica with the University of Tasmania special collections team,
• Attending the FOSS4G conference in Melbourne, to be around like minded people and learn a heap of new things in the workshops,
• Getting our first full-time support engineer, and generally becoming more mature around our processes for support,
• The Wildlife Drones project, especially seeing the demonstrations that have been held in Perth the last few days to see the reaction of the clients to all the work we have been doing on it,
• Setting up new technologies, like Grafana, cross platform mobile technologies, Sparx Enterprise Architect, and better use of our existing systems like Youtrack,
• Working on our new larger projects (more on that in the new year),
• Seeing our growth this year, but sustainably – just like we do everything at Gaia Resources,
• Our rehabilitation and data project with IGO Mining, where we were able to really help that organisation to make a difference,
• Our recent focus on “telling more stories” with our blog, especially the story of the Leadbeaters Possum, which has had quite a bit of interest since we released it, and
• The general transformation that the company has had over the last year, in terms of the move to FLUX, the focus on process, the new projects coming in and the exciting opportunities for the new year.

That’s a bunch of good things to reflect on as we wind down to the end of the year – and as a few people said afterwards, that’s not even the full list, as I only asked for one!

For me, the highlight has been the team that gave me all these points above.  A company is really only as good as the people who are in it, and due to them, it’s been a great journey over the last 12 months.  As always, it’s been the roller coaster that is running a small business, but I have to say, with this team around me and with us all supporting each other, it’s been a great year.  So my own highlight is the people that work here with me in this crazy ‘family’ we’ve created that is called Gaia Resources.

I’m looking forward to the break – where as is tradition a few of us will be working on a range of things to do with the business for the new year, including preparing for our ‘usual’ new year launch event, and bunch of new and exciting announcements.  I hope that you and your family – work or otherwise – all have a safe and happy Christmas break!

Merry Christmas and see you in 2019!

Piers

The post Merry Christmas! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Approximately one million disposable coffee cups end up in landfill or the environment every minute of every day, and most cannot be recycled due to a thin plastic lining.

Most disposable coffee cups, even those labelled as recyclable, contain a thin layer of plastic. (Image credit: ABC’s 7:30 Report).

In February last year Piers and I gazed upon the coffee-addicted Gaia staff cradling their disposable coffee cups every day and decided that, particularly as an environmental company, something had to change. Piers promptly ordered a bunch of company-branded reusable coffee cups.

These cups were met with an enthusiastic response, and with a little adjustment period for the behavior change, and a rather humorous punishment scheme for anyone who forgot to use theirs, we have seen the blue and white Gaia cups completely replace disposable ones.

We have 21 staff at Gaia Resources, and all except two (very, very weird) staff members enjoy a cuppa daily. Personally, I just make myself one from instant coffee (or, as the gang like to call it, ‘powdered disappointment’) but between the remaining, normal staff we have used our keep cups roughly 75 times each week, or around 6000 times since they were purchased back in February last year.

That’s around 6000 disposable coffee cups and plastic lids spared from landfill, just for our team.

What that looks like for each of our team members

That astounding figure this small change has made reminded me of a quote I saw during the recent single-use plastic bag debate:  “’One bag won’t make a difference’, said 8 billion people”.  If we can each be mindful of saying no thank you to excess packaging, single use items, or that cute tiny umbrella in our Friday cocktail, we can indeed make a difference.

What behavior changes have you made to reduce your waste? Leave a comment below or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Tracey

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