Their website states: “Would you like to submit a project for on-ground funding or submit a sighting of a feral animal or weed species? Use our interactive mapping tool to map out proposed fence lines, plan revegetation projects or to report sightings of wildlife, native flora and weeds.  You can even add photos, property maps  and additional information.”

The interactive map displays other layers hosted on the South West Catchment Council‘s GRID application, and this is a small but important piece of the work we do to empower the natural resource management sector.

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The team had previously reviewed over 45 mobile mapping apps in the market, and Mappt was selected for this project. A standardised form was configured to capture a number of attributes that would characterise a weed cover area, including weed community type, dominant species and stage (e.g. flowering, seeding). Other important layers like imagery and administrative layers were sourced from the City of Stirling and Landgate.

The person in the field is able to capture geo-tagged and time-stamped photographs along with the form information, and the collected data is then synchronised to a field laptop and used to feed into an annual weed management report for the local council to help them plan treatment activities and ongoing monitoring.

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To enable this study, Gaia Resources converted a standalone database of hundreds of individual projects into a GIS layer and published it to the State NRM GRID application so that information about natural resource management project activities (e.g. fencing, coastal rehabilitation, weed management, planting, community workshops) and investment dollars could be compared over time and across other layers like local government areas and regions. The spatial team at Gaia Resources also compiled data from associated spreadsheets, reports and internet research to add value to the grant projects layer, so that staff could use it as a primary reference point for project descriptions and contact points.

In a subsequent engagement in 2018, Community Stewardship grant boundaries were added.

The resulting data helps to inform future grant investment strategy, and has saved staff many hours of effort otherwise spent in locating historical project folders and information across multiple locations. The team at the State NRM office now have that information at their fingertips and, through the GIS tools in their GRID application, have the capability to generate statistics and reports on the fly.

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The EMRC Administrator is now a part of the GRID Champions community and receives training and support, including regular updates on data availability and system enhancements.

This project was made possible through funding from the Western Australian State NRM organisation, through their Community Capacity Building Grants.

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The Gaia Resources team worked to develop a proof of concept system that includes a workflow and field data capture application so the Banjima Rangers can collect baseline and monitoring data against the specific targets and assets defined in the Healthy Country Plan. Central to the Healthy Country Plan implementation is the online Miradi system – a program that allows nature conservation practitioners to design, manage, monitor and learn from their projects to more effectively meet their conservation goals. The challenge of this project was to understand how Banjima Rangers could leverage both technology and processes to complement the Miradi system, and by doing so improve the quality of field data collection, monitoring and evaluation workflows.

The process behind evaluating the state of a Healthy Country Plan involves targeted on-ground activities with baseline and on-going monitoring data collection.

The field data capture application is based on the commonly used Fulcrum mobile mapping platform, and configured using standardised forms and mapping layers. Fulcrum is not necessarily the final solution, but as a proof of concept represents good value and a complementary range of out-of-the box functionality for both Android and iOS devices. It’s web based viewer and data management tools provide an ideal starting point for proving the Banjima workflows can be supported with a robust (but simple to use) technology solution. This controlled method of data capture ensures that spatial information and media (e.g. geotagged photos, videos, audio snippets) can be captured consistently by different Rangers over time. The forms were also designed to match the Miradi platform schema for ongoing data entry and monitoring.

A GIS Analyst from the Gaia Resources team accompanied traditional owners and Conservation Management staff on a field study to the Fortescue Marsh; in part to test the field application, but primarily to understand more about the environment, constraints and opportunities within which the Rangers operate.

Jake Geddes (Gaia Resources) and Banjima Rangers discussing field data collection techniques.

A summary report was produced for the Banjima Native Title Corporation which reflects on the learnings and recommendations from the proof of concept project. More work is anticipated as Conservation Management work on further capacity building and standardisation of monitoring activity under the Healthy Country Plan.

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After some initial consultation, the setup for the State NRM GRID instance was completed, and training rolled out in March 2017.  As part of this ongoing support will be provided to further streamline the instance of GRID to suit the needs of the State NRM Program.

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2017 saw a number of themes of work broken up into discrete development sprints. First, the Gaia Resources team tackled the back-end infrastructure – by optimising software libraries and cloud server configurations. As an outcome of our lean Agile process, we were also able to respond at this early stage in the project to the calls for web map service integration. GRID now has the ability to add layers from WMS and WMTS services. Support for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) content has been a massive win for the NRM community, and was combined late in the project with Gaia Resources negotiating a better deal with Landgate for access to their SLIP subscription layers (e.g. State wide imagery, cadastre, tenure, topography).

Through a series of Agile sprints, the project realised value for GRID customers through the following feature areas:

• Linkages: GRID customers able to share Activity schemas
• Enhanced filtering and reporting
• Symbolise by attribute
• Permissions (e.g. Group security)

Other key deliverables of this project were not related to development of the GRID product, but included:

• Centralised data sourcing: monthly updates of externally sourced data
• GRID Mobile Pilot: a comprehensive report of mobile mapping solutions available for NRM uses
• StateNRM GRID instance: a new GRID for the State government coordinating body

The StateNRM Office use GRID to support grant programs and capacity building activities across Western Australia.

This project is a great example of a customer-centric approach to product development. Gaia Resources and the StateNRM office understood that the greatest benefits could be realised through regular consultation with the lead technical staff in the NRM community – called GRID Champions. By engaging them at each development stage (e.g. requirements workshops and testing), the Gaia Resources team had much greater clarity on the priority and composition of new features they were expected to deliver.

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• South Coast NRM and GRID

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• Pilbara Corridors and Conservation Action Planning
• Pilbara Corridors Update – Workshop Two
• Pilbara Corridors Update – Workshop 2A

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• Spatial analysis,
• Training (such as the Quantum GIS training we ran in 2014),
• Web mapping (such as the upcoming SWCC Climate Change web site), and
• Support for spatial tools.

We have also been working with SWCC’s delivery partners across the South West region to extend our services to them as well, including supporting them in the use if SWCC’s GRID instance.

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The project involved discussing the work that is being done in the field by the Rangelands team, and then developing up Activities within the GRID implementation that met these requirements.  GRID’s flexible schema allowed for Activities to be set up to record a wide range of information that the Rangelands team plan, capture and report on in the field.

Additionally, a range of base layers were identified as being required for the Rangelands team, including access to imagery across their operating area; covering 85% of the State of Western Australia.  These datasets were sourced, processed and loaded into the GRID system.

Finally, we have trained the Rangelands team in how to use the GRID system through a workshop environment, and continue to support the team through an ongoign support contract, where we also assist them with their spatial data needs.

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