Gaia Resources worked closely with the NAFI team to design and build the app, which you can now download onto your device from the Apple Store or Google Play Store.

The release coincides with the 2021 Savanna Fire Forum being run remotely from Darwin to over 150 participants.  Available for Android and iOS, the app enables land owners, indigenous rangers, conservation scientists, pastoralists and others to get near real-time fire information across 80% of the Australian continent. It is part of a bunch of support we have been providing to NAFI and other fire management groups in recent years (click here for a snapshot of previous blogs), and we are really excited about our contribution up in the Top End.

On the surface the app simply reflects the powerful data products available from the NAFI website that are already used extensively across projects and programs in the north of Australia to monitor savanna burning programs and bushfires.  Fire scars are displayed representing remotely sensed burnt areas coloured by the month of the fire, as are thermal hotspots detected from an array of satellites. These data layers are presented in an intuitive mapping interface with a small selection of base maps, location and compass direction functionality.

The NAFI app starts with a view of your region (left), presents a legend and layer selector (middle left), provides topo and imagery base maps (middle right) and near real-time hotpots (right).

In this initial release, the idea is to get the data out there onto mobile devices, and the NAFI team are keen to have that drive discussion about enhancements that will deliver high value to people working in the field and planning their fire management activities. This could be planners and rangers on carbon abatement programs focused on early dry season controlled burns, or community and government organisations battling raging bushfires, like the one that swept through 87,000 hectares of the World Heritage Listed Fraser Island last December (here is a link to the most recent article on that event).

An earlier test version of the app (left) during the December, 2020 Fraser Island fire. Image source: The Australian.

When you start using the app, you’ll notice a few little gems in there that are all focused on increasing the accessibility and usefulness of that NAFI data. So let’s start with the near real-time aspect:

• the app checks for updates regularly, with hotspots updated every 20 minutes on average, and fire scars updated 2-3 times per week,
• data is pulled down dynamically from the NAFI server and processed on AWS cloud-based infrastructure,
• the data is then automatically uploaded to the person’s device whenever they have the app running with a mobile data connection.

Next, let’s consider the offline capabilities:

• the app allows you to download base maps (OpenMapTiles imagery or NAFI’s Topographic map) for your region(s) of interest,
• you can continue to work outside of a mobile data connection, with the most recent fire scar and hotspot data from when you were last online and had the app running,
• the location marker and compass direction give you geographical context online or offline.

Hundreds of thousands of hotspots are rendered seamlessly using a heatmap algorithm. To overcome a performance constraint for mobile devices, we have devised a rendering algorithm that can render tens of thousands concurrent hotspot points across Australia into temporal heat map clusters. People using the app can get that regional view of hot spots and visualise three different fire age groupings in purple (0-6hrs), red (6-24hrs) and blue (24-48hrs). The app also features some high resolution fire scar mapping of the Darwin area sourced from Sentinel satellite imagery, as part of a trial implementation with BushfiresNT. The continental scale fire scar mapping is based on MODIS satellite imagery (250m resolution), so the new Sentinel based mapping based on much higher resolution imagery is an exciting new space to keep an eye on.

Being an initial release, the NAFI team are looking for feedback future versions, or just to hear what you think – there’s a direct feedback link in the app itself too. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to reach out to us and start up a conversation by sending me an email or getting in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post Fire information app launch appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Sustainability and the Cloud appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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!

The post A greener cloud… appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our old space at FLUX, may it bring much luck and support to whomever it houses in the future

Yes, we didn’t move that far – just across to the other side of the floor – but we moved for a few really good reasons.  One is that with some of our recent projects, we’re hiring new staff and looking at expansion.  On top of that, we’re also getting some new certifications around information security, and we thought that we should also get ourselves a physically separate space to go along with that.  The team at FLUX were really supportive, providing us with a new space to move into – and one we can further grow into.

What’s behind door number 1? Visit us to find out!

The move went very smoothly – we are starting to wonder if this should be a service we offer! – and completed within an hour.  We had packed up all our gear, and moved across to the new space on the other side of the floor, unpacked and powered back on.  This is all down to how much of our work we no longer carry around with us – thanks to a lot of our systems now living “in the cloud”*.  So, we simply unplugged, moved our gear, and plugged back in – and lo and behold, we are up and running again nice and smoothly.  The cloud does wonders for moving offices!

With the change of location comes a bit of a change of attitudes, and a chance to refresh and refocus ourselves – we look forward to having a new place to show off next time you come to visit us, but in the meantime you can keep in touch via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

* Along with the Monkey King.

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