The course will be held over two days – 18 and 19th November at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via training@gaiaresources.com.au or call us on 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

The post Two day QGIS training course appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The course will be held over two days on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd June at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our June course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via: 

Email: training@gaiaresources.com.au
Phone: 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here: https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post EOFY – QGIS Training Course appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Credit: Chris Montgomery (Unsplash)

These days you can learn about almost any topic by watching videos online. But the benefits of having a trainer present to guide and correct you, troubleshoot issues, and maximise your learning makes face-to-face training invaluable. So how does this translate when the people you’re teaching are thousands of kilometres away, watching you on a video call?

Whilst face-to-face trainers are irreplaceable in terms of effectiveness, particularly for novice classes, there are many benefits to remote training such as:

• Greater flexibility for timing and duration.
• Reduced costs (especially if inter-regional travel is involved); and
• A much greater geographic reach.

Recently a client rang asking if I could teach their team a couple of new skills in QGIS in a hurry so they could get a report over the line. We had to put together some training material in a short time frame and attempt to deliver it as an effective learning session. And from all accounts, the training was a success!

Here’s how we made it work:

1. Small class size
2. Use appropriate teaching mediums
3. Teach the concepts, not just the content
4. Give attendees prior knowledge of the topic
5. Limit your audience appropriately
6. Preparation!

1. Small class size

This one is a no-brainer. In a small group, the trainer can provide more one-on-one time, people are less likely to fall behind if they get lost at any stage, and you won’t need to stop as frequently to help people out as you would in a large class. Manageable class sizes are especially important when running remote training, since watching demos on a computer monitor can be trickier for students than being present in a room.

2. Use appropriate teaching mediums

The majority of people learn best via visual formats and hands-on exercises. As a trainer you’re already challenged with keeping attendees engaged and focused (doubly so for remote training), so look for opportunities to use visual learning tools.

It’s no cliché that a picture tells a thousand words! Most people zone out when they see a wall of text (like this blog post).

Something as simple as a stick figure diagram in a slide show with some animated components can get through to your audience and give them that “Aha!” moment that is so gratifying as a trainer.

Here’s an image we’ve used in our QGIS course – a humorous but helpful take on the difference between raster and vector images (humour is another fantastic tool for learning!):

3. Teach the concepts, not just the content

You’ve got your training program established. You have a workbook full of exercises and instructions. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of just having attendees learn the HOW by working through those exercises like robots, without understanding the WHY.

Start with the concepts. Break them down into digestible explanations. Use analogies, diagrams, and practical real-world examples. Then open the floor up for discussion – get attendees to think about how this concept or tool might apply to their own work/life, or where they can see its application. Not only will this help them get their heads around the concepts, but it will also help you grow as a trainer with a better understanding of your target audience.

4. Give attendees prior knowledge of the topic

OK, understandably this is not always feasible – people are coming to you to learn a skill, after all. But where possible you can give students a leg-up with simple, engaging prerequisite material to help them grasp the fundamentals before the day of the actual training. This could be in the form of educational videos, instructions on how to set up the software, and even a beginner’s exercise for the course. By allowing attendees to familiarize themselves with the software and material they’ll come into your training with a rudimentary understanding, instead of blindly.

5. Limit your audience appropriately

Something else to consider is limiting who you run remote training for, based on the difficulty of the training. In our case, the attendees all had some prior experience using other GIS software, which allowed them to navigate QGIS with relative ease. Where possible, try to gain an understanding of the proposed attendees and their relevant skills, and make a judgement call on whether your training is accessible enough to them in the remote format.

6. Preparation!

Another no-brainer here, but too often overlooked. Small things go wrong all the time, and can diminish your appearance of professionalism and competency, as well as disrupt the class. Well in advance:

• Triple-check all material and send out any necessary material to attendees.
• Provide clear instructions to attendees with times, meeting links, and any prerequisites.
• Do an internal “dress rehearsal” to check your camera, mic, slideshows etc.
• Be sure to leave some wriggle room for technical difficulties (at both your end and the attendees).

With more people working from home, or staff scattered geographically, it’s the perfect time to look at converting your training to an online offering, and hopefully, these tips help get you off on the right foot. Take a look at our existing QGIS course information for in-person and online training.

If you have any further ideas, please leave a comment below. Or if you would like to talk to us about our QGIS training offerings, please get in touch with us via training@gaiaresources.com.au or our social media streams – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Tracey

The post Remote learning: tips for trainers to maximise success appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Not unexpectedly, we’ve had a rise in the number of people asking us for our freely available online QGIS training materials (currently for version 2.18, which is pretty old now – but the course is getting a makeover for version 3.10 soon).  So we did a little digging on who’s using our course now — there’s been a bit more of a spread across the world:

QGIS online training users by country

The uptick in requests this year perhaps coinciding with people looking for things to do when they are at home in isolation.

This approach – create a series of videos that people watch and work through training guides – is one way to deliver online training. We thought we should identify some alternatives and how they might also be deployed.

We could deliver training workshops for our clients in exactly the same way – write a script, record a bunch of screencasts, record separate voice-overs, and then mash them all together with a blend of editing magic to create a course.  While great for our free online QGIS course, it’s not an adequate replacement for face-to-face classroom training.

Lately, we’ve been investigating the capacity of all of our different internet connections from home to see if we can offer a live-streaming style approach.  At the moment, most of us could do that, but there are always going to be issues – connections can drop for a bunch of reasons. So, if a live-streaming approach was going to happen (through whatever videoconferencing software our clients want us to use) it’d be best to break the training up into smaller pieces. This is an advantage, as it’s hard to focus on this type of videoconference for a long period of time (although we’re all getting used to it!).

We’ve also been looking at what schools are doing, using systems such as Google Classroom.  Through this platform, in particular, you can create a nice blend of the two approaches: put together teaching materials, set up videoconferencing sessions to cover those materials, and then combine them with the available assessment frameworks.  With training courses due for some projects in the next few months, we’re working on how these tools may be able to help deliver them, in these new circumstances we find ourselves in.

Necessity is certainly the mother of invention! In the last couple of weeks we’ve gone from having simple stored videos to creating full classes in Google Classroom, so we should be able to resume custom training for all of our clients within another week or so once we finalise our trials.  And then, perhaps, all the people on this map (showing where people who have asked for training live) can have an even better experience!

If you are interested in some classroom based remote training (or even in being our guinea pigs in a couple of external ones that we intend to trial in the next few weeks), then please get in touch with us via training@gaiaresources.com.au and let us know what you are interested in!  Or you can drop us a line on our social media streams – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Stay safe and healthy, and see you online!

Piers

The post Remote training options appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Testing GRID in the field appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Discussing the important matters of fire escapes and where to buy the best coffee.

When writing the course material, we ask ourselves:

• what skills and outcomes should people who are completely new to GIS gain from this course?
• what are the most effective teaching / learning formats?

1. Course outcomes

For someone with no prior GIS experience, being thrown in the deep end can be very daunting. There is a steep learning curve when getting acquainted with a new user interface, spatial data types, and some of the more “WTF?” concepts of GIS. Our aim is to present the material in a way that makes sense to a novice and have them leave the course with an understanding of the fundamentals, as well as practical experience in using the QGIS software. The way in which we achieve this is discussed below.

2. Effective teaching and learning

It’s well-established that humans aren’t machines, ergo have variations in both their abilities and the ways in which they learn. There are, however, trends we can use to best direct how we run our QGIS training. Consider the VARK learning styles model, which breaks learning styles into four categories, with research showing that the majority of people (61%) learn best through employing two or more modes. In our QGIS course, we present the material using a combination of all four modes – a detailed, step-by-step user guide; live demonstrations on the big screen; interactive, practical exercises; and a trainer that won’t shut up describes key learning points and who encourages discussion.

The VARK learning styles.

An essential part of being able to teach a beginner in any topic is being able to put yourself in their shoes and present the main learning points in a logical and digestible manner. We achieve this in a number of ways in our QGIS course, such as:

• providing visual learning aids such as demonstrations and an animated slideshow,
• providing examples that relate to the attendee’s careers and roles,
• combining self-paced, supervised exercises together with the trainer working through exercises on the projector screen (without ‘doing the work’ for people),
• asking attendees to answer questions after each learning module,
• varying the pace and teaching style throughout the day to cater for mental fatigue, and
• maintaining engagement and focus through (poor) humour and the occasional (terrible) analogy. Humour is an effective teaching tool for engaging participants and redirecting focus.

As a trainer, the most satisfying part of my job is seeing people have “Aha! moments” – those moments where they suddenly understand the fundamentals of a topic they have previously been baffled by. Anecdotally, I’ve mostly encountered Aha! moments when drawing diagrams or using analogies.

In Darwin, we inadvertently created a wave of Aha! moments on the topic of Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS). Our training data focuses on an area in southern WA, but for the Darwin training Chris put together an exercise looking at a national park in the NT. This simple switch in geolocation forced attendees to apply what they’d learnt about CRS, and switch from a WA-centric CRS to one that worked for the NT. Several people commented that they finally understood CRS. This is a great example of how talking about a topic won’t necessarily get the point across to someone, yet a simple additional step – making them apply that concept to a practical exercise – helps the penny drop.

Chris answers the tough questions during one of our one-day courses in Darwin.

Every time we run the QGIS training we take away valuable observations and user feedback, and we are continually improving the course content and how it is delivered. We’re looking to bring our Beginner’s course to regional parts of WA and other States in Australia, and we’re currently working on new material for a potential Intermediate course (so stay tuned)!

If you’d like to attend our QGIS Beginner’s Course, or even discuss a more tailored training program for you or your staff, please drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tracey

The post NT QGIS training: the pursuit of effective teaching methods appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The sunset over Darwin. 

After experiencing another dry and extreme fire season in 2019, the Forum was an important gathering of fire practitioners, park managers, policy-makers, ecologists, researchers and carbon industry experts to share knowledge to improve our understanding and practice of savanna fire management. To an outsider – like myself last year – it may seem a bit counter-intuitive that we would consider lighting fires to reduce our carbon footprint; but on a regional scale across two States and a Territory that is precisely what is happening in a deliberate carbon abatement and land management effort. Through careful planning and application of the on-ground knowledge of traditional owners, the controlled burning of savanna grasslands in the early dry season (typically April – June) greatly reduces the more severe late dry season bushfires that are so destructive to whole landscapes and ecosystems. The less burning, of course, means less carbon is emitted into our atmosphere.

The Forum kicked off with Bilawara Lee of the local Larrakia people giving over 320 delegates a warm Welcome to Country, followed by a keynote address from Luke Gosling (MP for Solomon). From there the scene was set with a summary of the 2019 fire weather from the Bureau of Meteorology where we heard about the fluctuations in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole – a strangely fascinating interaction I won’t go into here but if you are interested BoM provide a monthly Climate Model Summary to describe how these two factors influence weather patterns across Australia. In particular, they help explain why we’ve had much drier conditions in the last two years.

Rohan Fisher from the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research then presented some great time-series of the burning patterns across WA, the NT and Queensland and stressed how “engagement with traditional knowledge and science in a very honest, open and respectful way… has resulted in the decrease in fire.” The screenshot below is an example where you can see the substantial month-by-month differences between 2019 and 2004 when similar climatic conditions prevailed but the fire management practices of recent times were not being coordinated. It is pretty telling that 44,800 square kilometres (or 4.48 million hectares) more area burned in 2004, and most of it in the late Dry months. By the way, SBS and other media outlets picked up on this good news story with interviews of Willie Rioli and Rohan, and the full set of NAFI animations and graphics produced for the Forum can be found here.

Late dry season burns in 2004 and 2019 across the north of Australia (snapshot of NAFI animation). Burning for the two years is shown by month on a histogram view (left) and corresponding map view (right).

There were some really interesting talks over the two days from ranger groups enlightening us with their experience and success stories on country, economic analysts considering the price of carbon and how to assess co-benefits, and scientists looking at biodiversity research and the relationship between fire management and ecosystem health. It was a dizzying array of topics that looked at important considerations for the industry, with something for everyone involved. A few highlights for me were the breakout session for fire ecology and biodiversity, where for example the Australian Wildlife Conservancy gave us a case study about the impact of fire on the fragile habitat of the purple crowned fairywren. 

The Department of Environment Natural Resources presented their research on native mammal population declines in different landscape types across the Northern Territory. In the plenary discussion of fire management on the world stage, we learned about the world-leading fire management practices in Australia compared to other savanna regions, and differences between Australia’s carbon abatement framework and other country’s carbon trading markets. Videos presentations are often a fun change-up, and I think everyone enjoyed the Lion King soundtrack that accompanied a video about the knowledge sharing expedition to Botswana – where indigenous rangers passed on knowledge of fire weather, ignition and management principles were passed on to local authorities there.

I’ve found the Forum to be a great way to network and meet people from a range of professions, and to get a perspective on the challenging activities these people get involved in – from not-for-profit organisations like the World Wildlife Fund to for-profit carbon project consultancies and public servants.

Enjoying a sunset drink and a catch-up at the Forum networking event with Ellie Boyle and Leigh-Ann Woolley from the World Wildlife Fund.

After chatting to a few people about small mammal recovery and ecosystem recovery, one of the things I spent some time looking into was how QGIS, Saga  and integrated field data collection solutions like QField or Fulcrum could play an important role in  planning and evaluation of carbon abatement projects. In fact, as part of the Forum we ran two QGIS training courses on the Thursday and Friday, so I was keen to see how that free and open source product could help industry practitioners beyond the basic production of maps.

On that topic, it was Susanne Casanova (Territory NRM) and others like Ben Corey (Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions) who got me thinking about how the industry needs to consider other fire metrics beyond the early vs late dry season burnt area statistics, and consider things like fragmentation (or distance between remnant vegetation patches) in measuring the success of a burning program. As far as I can ascertain, early Dry Season burning and its lower intensity fires generally result in more patchy landscapes with greater opportunity for small native mammals to recover. [Note: I would love to learn more from the experts in this field, and understand there are many factors that influence fire behaviour].  These small bits of remaining habitat are important pieces in the biodiversity puzzle as they provide refuge from predators and feral animals as well as food sources. An analysis could be looking at fragmentation and these distance measures in relation to the range distance of a particular endangered species (or collection of species). The resulting data can be an important measure for both planning burning regimes and after to understand how effective the approach has been. QGIS landscape ecology plug-ins together with Sentinel-2 (or higher resolution imagery) look like they provide some great potential for adding value here.

Tracey will give a recap of the QGIS training we have been running lately, but as the first run of it in Darwin I think it was a great success. We had nine attendees for these two one-day courses with representation from the Northern Territory Government, pastoral groups, NRM fire managers and environmental consultancies. Great facilities at the centrally located Darwin Innovation Hub which we will use again, and from all accounts everyone really learned a lot about how to start using this powerful software in their own environmental activities. From the feedback Tracey and I received, we know people wanted another day or an intermediate session, so I will be looking at ways to make that happen and to continue building capacity in the north.

If any of this recap has piqued your interest, or you want to talk about your own adventures in fire management or use of spatial tools like QGIS, please feel free to start a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or e-mail me directly on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au

Chris

The post Savanna Fire Forum Review appeared first on Gaia Resources.

She Codes cupcakes

Tracey, one of our environmental scientists and support specialist writes “She Codes was a great experience overall. I have been learning the basics of Python coding online, but the tutorials were quite dry and heavy on information. In the She Codes workshop we used a practical exercise that was both informative and fun – coding a basic video game where you guide a turtle around a screen chomping on ‘space cabbages’. Having something fun and engaging really made the learning curve less daunting and kept my focus, and each module felt rewarding as my turtle gained new abilities.”

Barbara, one of our spatial analysts said “There was a good choice of subjects – WordPress, Django, Python and HTML with CSS – and plenty of mentors to help out with problems or just to talk to. Each had a badge with their field of expertise so it was easy to find answers. I also have to mention the famous cupcakes – they were delicious ;)”

She Codes founder Kate Kirwin says “This initiative has truly created a space for women to be welcomed into the tech industry, and I’m more than pleased to announce that 40% of the women who were part of the 2019 pilot program have now secured new roles within tech”. With a combination of in-person and virtual mentoring, She Codes Plus provides successful participants with the essentials required to pursue careers in technology-focused roles. Conducted on a part-time basis, participants undertake four unique projects focussed on building web applications using the HTML/CSS, Python, Django and React.

She Codes coders in Saturdays workshop (photo courtesy of She Codes)

In our Brisbane office, Sophie and Megan attended the Brisbane PyLadies chapter last week. PyLadies is a mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Their mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings. PyLadies also aims to provide a friendly support network for women and a bridge to the larger Python world.

Sophie reports that “Megan and I braved last Thursday’s meeting despite pouring rain – we were both a bit damp, but enthusiastic! We heard Toni Sefton speak on her personal experience getting into coding and Python using a less-than-direct path. She was open about the challenges in overcoming her own doubts; being willing to take a risk on this change in direction in her life despite feeling that she still had too much to learn. One of the key factors in helping her to develop her own skills was having a supportive mentor. This helped to also remind me of the importance of providing that support and encouragement when friends and colleagues show an interest in expanding their knowledge and skills in the future.

Then Bertrand Caron spoke about different approaches to writing modern Python code. While a lot of it was beyond my skill level, he helpfully provided his slides for future reference, and I am sure I will be looking back on these with interest once my skills allow it! It was great to see part of the supportive and motivated coding community learning together.”

Our team are looking out for more opportunities like this to participate and learn, so if you know of other great initiatives like She Codes or PyLadies, then please feel free leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post She {Codes} and PyLadies appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Firstly, while we haven’t had a massive number of requests, demand is steady.  In December, we crossed the 250 request mark, and you can see how this has increased over time by looking at the graph below.

We do store some very basic information against each request, and we’ve started asking for two main things – ‘what country do you live in?’ and ‘what industry do you work in?’.  So, where in the world is the demand for this?  We have the points above, but let’s do a quick snapshot view of it by country…

Even though we only have a few hundred responses, use comes from both developed and developing countries, implying that QGIS provides value for all sorts of organisations.  Our word-of-mouth and marketing approach has been very Australian-centric to date (with an obvious smattering of people finding us via search engines), but the majority of our requesters come from Australia.

But, who are all these people?  Well, that’s much harder to say for a couple of reasons; while we have a range of people who were willing to let us know which industry they were in, a large number of them joined up before the additional ‘which industry are you in’ question was added – so over half (51%) are actually unknown.  We ended up using a fairly commonplace list of industry terms, as you can see from the chart below.

Unsurprisingly, especially since our course was originally titled an “environmental QGIS course”, there has been a lot of uptake in the environmental industry sector.  There are also some real gems in the emails that we have received about how people want to use QGIS. Some of the reasons people are using our training materials include:

• nature conservation, natural resource management and environmental science across Australia,
• undertaking protected area management and biodiversity conservation in Nepal,
• nature conservation in Croatia, and
• doctors working in the public sector of Myanmar, using it for case mapping.

When we released our training course for free (thanks to support from Project Dieback and South Coast NRM), these are exactly the sort of people we wanted to help out.

In more recent times, I’ve been also talking to the technical team behind QGIS and the documentation component in particular.  My recent discussions with that team around documentation seemed to focus on Git repositories, APIs and Python code, which might be useful for developers but doesn’t provide any value to a doctor in a developing country trying to work out where the disease they are treating is spreading and how to get on top of it.  I strongly believe that the QGIS team needs to focus documentation on the groups that use it – or, to use a dirty phrase that many technical people don’t want to hear – be customer-focused.  If focus and attention are taken away from these customers, then the project will cease to be useful to people and it will decline through lack of demand.

I do think that QGIS is one of the best spatial packages out there (for both closed or open source) but unless there is a focus on customers, that won’t continue.  So to attempt to help prevent this, we’ll shortly be releasing our new series of QGIS videos, data package and training manual, against the current long-term version of QGIS (3.4), so stay tuned for that.  We’re also running multiple training courses this month – a couple of custom ones for organisations that are using QGIS as part of their enterprise spatial systems, and another “open call” one that has already gathered support from a range of organisations that are sending along their staff.

We’ll keep working to make sure that open-source software, like QGIS, can deliver really effective value across a wide range of organisations, in a very practical and pragmatic sense.  It’s great to think that we can make a difference like this.

If you’re interested in QGIS, or want to get hold of our training materials, then drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au – and don’t forget you can keep in touch with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Summer of QGIS Training online appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So it’s a perfect time to up-skill your spatial techniques to get the most out of that hard-won field data.

Summer QGIS Training

Our standard two-day course is run at our HQ in FLUX on St George’s Tce in the centre of Perth, but can be delivered on-site at your location, just for your team. We can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. Our GIS trainers run the courses for a maximum of 6 or 12 attendees, so we often run open courses to minimise the per-person cost of attendance.

We have also developed a successful free QGIS online training package over the last couple of years which has been very popular around the world, as you can see from the map and graph below.

January 2020 courses are filling up, so email or call us to discuss your training requirements. You can read more about just what we offer here: https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/.

Email our general training address at training@gaiaresources.com.au if you’d like to register for training, or get in touch via these email addresses or start a conversation with us on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

The post Summer QGIS Training Courses appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Associate Professor Kirsten Parris (right) from the University of Melbourne’s School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences covered a lot of ground during each two-hour workshop, explaining: the structure of the Clean Air Urban Landscapes (CAUL) Hub, its role as one of six National Environmental Science Programs (NESP), her role as CAUL Hub leader, the aims of the four modules in the Urban Wildlife app – Frogs, Flying-foxes, Beneficial Insects and Possums and gliders, the science behind her Bell frog research, how to use the observation and survey functions of the app, and where does the data go once citizen scientists have contributed the data.

During the workshop, Kirsten taught attendees how to conduct field surveys using the CAUL Urban Wildlife app, after which they could be flagged as trained in the administrative backend for the app. In the last third of the workshop attendees visited UWA’s Sunken Gardens to put their new-found skills to the test during a practice frog survey, though sadly, no frogs could be heard or seen. Two days later, a quick afternoon trip to a backyard in suburban Hamilton Hill was resoundingly successful!

Frog survey in UWA’s Sunken Garden

Motorbike frogs in a Hamilton Hill backyard

Gaia Resources were initially engaged by the CAUL Hub in 2017 to develop the Urban Wildlife citizen science app to enable data capture for a range of urban species – Bell frogs, Flying-foxes and Beneficial insects. We very recently added a fourth module, for all Australian Possums and Gliders, sponsored by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

The design allows for multiple projects to be available via a single app login so that volunteers could choose to participate in any project. Each project has an independent data schema and the app would check in to the schema server on startup to ensure the latest schema was in use. This saved users from having to update the app in some circumstances when schema changes were made.

The free CAUL Urban Wildlife app is available on Android and iPhone: https://nespurban.edu.au/platforms/caul-urban-wildlife-app/.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, or how a smartphone app could improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then 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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Study after study has shown the immediate benefits of animals in the workplace. That’s where Gaia’s latest employee, Kiri the boxer puppy, comes in. Kiri is training to be a service dog, which requires exposing her to as many sights, smells and sounds as possible during the age of 8-12 weeks.

Introducing Kiri, the service dog in training.

Piers and the Flux team have very kindly allowed me to bring her into the Perth office a couple of days a week to facilitate this training, which in turn has had a very positive impact on not only the Gaia staff, but the many other workers that share the floors at Flux.

Some things I’ve noticed since bringing Kiri in to work:

• I have gotten to know more people in two weeks than in the entire 18 months we’ve been at Flux, because they all come over for a chat and a cuddle.
• People smile just looking at her. And they turn to mush when you let them have a pat or a cuddle.
• In meetings, the overall vibe is a lot more relaxed when Kiri is present.
• Productivity tends to increase on the days I bring Kiri in. Although she may be a (very cute) distraction, when staff return to their work they are in a better frame of mind.

Productivity has been shown to increase when a dog is brought to the workplace. It is, however, occasionally compromised!

For me personally, I feel a bit distracted and overwhelmed at times because I am constantly being pulled from my work to tend to Kiri’s needs, but I know things will become significantly easier once she is out of the puppy phase, toilet trained, and less inclined to munch on computer cables.

And when she curls up in my arms, all stress melts away.

If you’d like to talk about the benefits of service dogs in the workplace (or just come in to meet Kiri!) then leave a comment below, start a chat with me via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via tracey.cousens@gaiaresources.com.au.

Tracey

Resources

• Assistance Dogs Australia
• Mind Dogs Australia
• Stephen M. Colarelli, Amanda M. McDonald, Matthew S. Christensen & Christopher Honts (2017). A Companion Dog Increases Prosocial Behavior in Work Groups. Anthrozoös 30(1): 77-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2017.1270595
• Foreman AM, Glenn MK, Meade BJ, Wirth O (2017). Dogs in the Workplace: A Review of the Benefits and Potential Challenges. Int J Environ Res Public Health 14(5): 498. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14050498

The post Introducing Kiri the service dog (in training) appeared first on Gaia Resources.