This year, you’re going to see a fair bit from us recapping what we’ve done to get to where we are over the last 20 years, and we thought we’d start this off in January with a bit of a look back to the start of things.

Back in 2004, I had left working in a biodiversity survey company to finish my Masters in Business Administration, and then started the current iteration of Gaia Resources (technically, I used the name back in 1997 and 1998 when I was doing some short term contracts for various organisations).

Gaia Resources started from my home – technically, from a small table in a side area off our lounge room – and look how we’ve come full circle – now, post COVID, we are mainly working from home these days once more.  

The story of Gaia Resources – right back from that table – is one that I look back and think about regularly – seeing some of the challenges we’ve faced and overcome really does help you to have the strength to take on new challenges and to solve other problems that arise.  So I thought I’d just write a little about the areas we’ve worked in over the twenty years as a starting point, and how far we’ve come.

When I started the company we were providing a range of spatial data services to the biological survey part of the environmental industry.  We were busy digitising the maps and tables from a range of different biological survey reports, creating digital datasets from paper sources.  Oh, how far we’ve come since then – like the projects we’ve done like using Artificial Intelligence to capture biodiversity data (such as our work with the Northern Territory).  One constant though – it has also been important to interacting with biodiversity data standards when doing this data collection (like the TDWG standards and the new Australian Biodiversity Information Standard), as we have done that throughout our history.

This pic was from The Stagg cafe in Hobart during the TDWG 2023 conference

In 2005 we saw the arrival of Google Maps, and that started to change the landscape of spatial data quite quickly – all of a sudden it was much more desirable to present spatial data through the browser.  Google Maps started to get traction over the next few years and we realised that digitising and producing paper maps was on the way out, so we started to hire software engineers into the company to build systems to manage spatial data.  To this day we are continuing to develop these biological data systems, such as our work on the Western Australian Biodiversity Information Office (both design and build) and the federal government’s Biodiversity Data Repository.

During those early days, we also found ourselves working with the Western Australian Museum, where we were supporting their collections databases – registers of all the vouchered specimens that they have in their collections.  This led to a chance meeting and discussion around Archives, and then we were providing services to a whole new sector, which has become one of the areas I’m very proud of.  

We have delivered a range of open source collections databases to the Archives sector in Australia, across Western Australia, Victoria and most notably Queensland, where – on the back of our work with the Queensland State Archives – we set up our second office in Brisbane.  All of a sudden, we were an Australian company – not just a Western Australian one.  So, from our origins around that little table, now we have offices and staff right around Australia – that’s been a big change!

As an aside – the Archives bug had bitten me in particular, and how!  Being at the most recent national Archives conference in Melbourne just reaffirmed how important this sector is – and how much we enjoy being part of it.  Going from our simple first steps of implementing collections databases to now implementing complete archival systems, including comprehensive digital preservation systems – all of this has been a big shift from our origins, but in the right direction!

Luke, Sarah and I went to the ASA conference in Melbourne in 2023 – our sixth one. Dennis Lillee was there already

The Environment and Collections areas have become pillars of what we do at Gaia Resources; there are other areas we also work in, but these two have come to be our mainstays.  We’ve even now designed the company to have these as our “units” – so that we are focused on our clients in these areas, and delivering high quality services to them.

There are a lot of people that have helped Gaia Resources get to the 20 year mark; clients, colleagues, friends and family.  But throughout the whole thing we could not have done what we have, as well as we have, without our team – our staff, our family away from home.  These people – past and present – have all contributed in some way to the organisation and without them we would not be here.  So to talk about the history of Gaia Resources without the people that came on the journey – so thank you to everyone who has, still does, (or will) work here at Gaia Resources – the place wouldn’t be what it is without your input along the way.  Thank you.

The team at team week in 2022 in Perth – one of the fondest memories from the last couple of years (which will be repeated this year – hopefully without COVID!)

I’m forever grateful to lead this team on our mission of making the world a better place, through the delivery of sustainable technology solutions in a responsible manner.  This year is going to be one where we get to celebrate that just a little bit, and that’s going to make for some fun times ahead.

Stay tuned for more about our history over the year, and for some bright new initiatives that we’re heading into.  Meanwhile, if you want to know more about us, why not drop me a line on email, or through our social media channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and now Instagram!

Piers

The post Twenty Years appeared first on Gaia Resources.

TDWG (“tadweeg”) is a great acronym and best explained from their own web site (www.tdwg.org):

Historically known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, today’s Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is a not-for-profit, scientific and educational association formed to establish international collaboration among the creators, managers and users of biodiversity information and to promote the wider and more effective dissemination and sharing of knowledge about the world’s heritage of biological organisms.

Unlike what the local cafes thought (hats off to The Stagg for this one) , it’s not a taxidermy or really even a taxonomy conference: it’s about biodiversity data and standards around that data – and it attracts people from all over the world.

What I found really amazing was not only the efforts that the organisers put into making sure the hybrid conference worked for both in-person attendees and those attending virtually, but the range of interesting and thought provoking papers that were presented.

It’s always hard to come up with a summary of a conference that goes for a week and involves a lot of thought provoking stuff – I mean, I’ve got about twenty pages of notes to work through – but Mieke and I are giving it a go for our team, so here’s the recap of that recap!

Firstly and we’ve got to claim our own stuff as a highlight – but both Mieke and I gave talks this year.  Mieke was talking about translating between the Darwin Core data standard and the Australian Biodiversity Information Standard, and this is a key part of the work we’re doing helping the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water deliver the Biodiversity Data Repository.  Meanwhile I was presenting on the work we’ve done on the Restricted Access Species Data (RASD) Service with the Atlas of Living Australia. Note: we’ll update this blog in the future with the recordings when they become available.

The themes that we saw at the conference that really stuck with us included:

• Data quality – a bunch of talks about data quality made us really agree that what defines quality is case dependent on the end user needs.  Having some “fitness for purpose” flags (e.g. suitable for modelling) that can be associated with them – this is far more nuanced than the usual “good quality” tags.
• Integration – there were talks on a range of systems like taxonomic backbones, data repositories and other systems – there are a lot of opportunities to synthesize and aggregate data, as well as connect to some significant infrastructure services that can really help with standardisation and connectivity between data sources.
• Terms of useMore and more fields – with the RASD workshop, we also saw some great talks about both the FAIR and CARE principles that really have given us food for thought.  These principles – RASD, FAIR and CARE – all provide frameworks for how to format data so that there are appropriate levels of access depending on the content and context.  Adding in some additional fields not only to the data stores that we work with, but also the data exchange methods we use, will certainly add a lot to the accessibility and meaningfulness that’s out there in biodiversity data space.
• Artificial Intelligence is out there and being used – we already knew this, but it was great to see a wide range of pragmatic and useful ways in which AI can assist in the efforts across the biodiversity community to solve some big challenges – digitisation, transcription, data processing, identification and data indexing just to name a few!  

One of the big things we did differently this year was to help out and support the first ever TDWG Student Prize.  This is a really important thing to do – supporting our students is the way to make sure that we’ll have a thriving and active community moving forward.  So it’s really important to support our students, and congratulations to Michael Elliott for taking the prize home, and for all the students who were part of the conference.  

Any conference is not without a lot of side-bar (or maybe front-bar) talks and Hobart put on a great show for us.  We were able to get out and try a bunch of different places with colleagues and friends – we can definitely recommend the Blood Orange Stout from Custom’s House.  Hobart is a great place to visit (I’ve been there a few times now) and will be back again in the future as well.

So finally, a big thanks to all the people that made it happen, both in person and virtually.  TDWG is pretty unique – it’s a conference that ticks two of my great loves of technology and biodiversity – and I’m really hoping it won’t be another 15 years before I get to another one!  If you want to know more about any of the topics touched on in this blog then drop me a line, or start a conversation with us on social media Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook!

Piers

The post TDWG 2023 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Earlier this month Piers Higgs, Sarah Aldrich and I took a trip to Melbourne to attend the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) 2023 conference at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). With a sense of enthusiasm on the flight over I was keen to get down into the details about archives and solve some challenges with my fellow conference participants.

My trip started Monday at Perth airport grabbing a coffee with Piers before our flight to the great city of Melbourne. Upon arrival in Melbourne we met up with Sarah, one of Gaia Resources’ Collection Analysts based in Canberra, and headed to our hotel located near the MCG. After a social dinner we cracked down on what our plan for ASA 2023 was, who is attending each session and what we wanted to learn. A screenshot of the event agenda can be seen below.

DAY 1:

An early morning run was the start of the day for Sarah, Piers and I decided to keep it a bit more relaxed… We met Sarah for coffees and breakfast at a local cafe then got ready to attend ASA 2023 – Rising to our Challenges. Upon arrival I was amazed to see the variety of archivists from all over Australia and even from Singapore, archivists representing the state archives around Australia but also archivists from local historical societies and schools. Day one had a focus on first nations archives and living history, as well as discussions on the use of AI in archives and the challenge for institutions in archiving big data. 

Day 1 Pre-conference selfie L-R Piers Higgs, Luke Connelly and Sarah Aldrich

Day one went by in a flash, there was a flurry of activities, plenty of notes and a new perspective on the challenges that archives are facing. After wrapping up the day the Gaia Resources fly-in team caught up with some of our Melbourne based team members. An interesting dinner in Federation Square was followed up by some ‘team-building’ at a few bars in the Melbourne CBD. Although Gaia Resources is an online based company it is great to meet co-workers in person and learn more about their lived experiences.

L-R, Sally O’Callaghan (Past Gaia Resources Employee, now working for the NAA), Drew Robinson, Sarah Aldrich, Luke Connelly, Piers Higgs

Day 2:

After a relaxed morning and breakfast, day two of the conference began with a panel discussion from the Queer Archives of Victoria. Then we began our sessions for the day covering digital preservation and digital transformation, with sessions hosted by the National Archives of Australia and the Public Records Office Victoria. It was great to see how archives benefit from technology like the ones developed by Gaia Resources. At the conclusion of the conference we heard from two industry experts, Pia Andrews and Barbara Reed, discussing governance in record keeping and how to personally stand out in archives. The launch of the 2024 ASA Conference wrapped up the final day and Gaia Resources may be heading off to Auckland next year…

Each of us also tried to put together a short summary of our conference highlights, including:

“It’s been 8 years since my first archives conference, and as an IT professional I find that I’m still learning more about how archives undertake their practice – but I’m glad to keep learning from them and trying to make sure we can deliver even better solutions for their problems.”

• Piers Higgs

“Having worked as an archivist prior to pivoting into tech, attending the ASA conference gives me the chance to act like a kid in a candy shop. It’s always a pleasure to connect with archivists, hear about their wins over the past year, talk shop, and discuss how tech can work to their advantage. I enjoy learning and keeping up with the current practices.”

• Sarah Aldrich

“The ASA Conference gave me insight into the challenges that archives are facing and how Gaia Resources can help these organisations grow through custom technological solutions.”

• Luke Connelly

In wrapping up my brief conference breakdown here are some key learnings highlighted by the Gaia Resources team from the 2023 ASA Conference:

1. Archives are essential to preserving our history both personally and on a government level: each record has at least one person attached to it, we must remember the importance of each record and the personal value attributed to it.
2. Conversations around digital preservation and technology such as AI are progressing. 
3. There’s still work to do around bridging the gap between Collecting organisations and technology solution providers. 
4. Gaia’s work and with our clients has demonstrated innovative solutions in the forefront of the field, notably our implementation of the archival management and digital preservation system for QSA and our work on Clio.

If you would like to know more about our digital preservation services and archival storage solutions please don’t hesitate to contact me or start a conversation with us on one of our social media platforms Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook

Luke

The post Rising to the challenge: Recap of the 2023 Australian Society of Archivists Conference appeared first on Gaia Resources.

It’s wonderful when you can actually find your tribe in this rather interesting world, and I think both Sarah and I felt like we were well accepted into the archival community through these events.  It’s great to be talking about all sorts of things and attending talks that expand on our knowledge of this area, and to be able to have those collegiate discussions in the breaks with contacts new and old.  It was also great to have an environmentally themed keynote (and a few other sessions), since we are actively trying to bring the knowledge of archiving and digital preservation to the environmental technology side of our business.  It was extra special to see our colleagues and clients from the Queensland State Archives present on the Digital Archiving program that we have been working on for a long time (2017 feels like a long time ago? A lot has happened since then).

Josephine Marsh presenting (virtually) on the Digital Archiving Program for Queensland State Archives

The content of this year’s conference had us thinking about a few key takeaway points:, including the fact that smaller archives are still struggling with their remit in a very resource constrained environment and that there are a lot of organisations starting on some sort of journey.  There were also a few of “the usual” presentations from the community – in these difficult times it seems that innovation is lagging a bit, but we did have a few conversations around Artificial Intelligence in the archives, following on from a previous blog and our work with transcription.  However, in watching these talks, the most pressing thing that we saw was a need for digital literacy and digital education amongst the community.

Digital literacy and digital education across a sector is something that I remember working through in my time with a different industry, the spatial industry.  A key segment of that community were cartographers, focusing on making maps, and the rise of digital technologies means that those positions were considered to be “under threat” from people with backgrounds in technology.  They were facing a very real change in that some of the profession was ‘stuck’ with old skillsets.

In archives, we face a similar challenge.  As archives embrace the digital, we need to work on building digital literacy and digital educational programs that will help our archivists build the skills that they will need to be archivists into the future.  This is readily transferable – the mindset of someone assessing a box of paper versus assessing a hard drive of documents is the same, but the skills that are needed to do it are the things that we can develop as a community.  Sarah and I came up with a bunch of ideas for digital archival training and we will be working more on that as part of our strategy for the next year, and approaching some of our archival training organisations as well.

It was great to be back with our tribe, and for me it was great to be back in Canberra to meet a range of colleagues face to face – the next one is all about “Rising to our Challenges” – so we’ll put a few challenges out there for that conference as well, and look forward to meeting everyone again in Melbourne!

In the meantime, if you’d like to know more, start a conversation on our social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook or send us an email.

Piers

The post Here we are (again?) appeared first on Gaia Resources.

To celebrate this software and bring the spatial community together, an annual conference is held known as FOSS4G, or Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial. This year Gaia were very proud to both sponsor and facilitate the conference on 12th November. The organising committee consisted of a crack team of volunteers from a range of businesses and educational facilities, who pulled off an incredible two-day event jam-packed with information and hands-on learning.

Things got off to a hairy start when one of our presenters came down with COVID-like symptoms and had to quarantine, but alas, these are the times we live in. The presentations that weren’t foiled by COVID were filmed and are available here on the FOSS4G SotM Oceania YouTube channel.

Russel Keith-Magee discusses his experiences in contributing the the open source community.

This year’s keynote presenters gave us a lot of food for thought: Russell Keith-Magee treated us to an energetic and enlightening introduction to the world of contributing to open source software. The audience were captivated and hopefully a few were inspired by his note that you don’t need to be able to code in order to contribute. Then Femina Metcalfe and Helen Ensikat unveiled the long journey to bringing open source software to the local government sector in Western Australia, revealing incredible foresight, persistence and tenacity. 

A series of presentations and 5 minute lightning talks, interspersed with top-notch catering from Joey Zaza’s, made for an enjoyable and educational event. We learnt about how open source spatial software is being used in the private, government and education sectors; we were shown how to collect spatial data in the field using the free QField mobile app; and we were treated to a number of fascinating scientific studies which were undertaken utilising free and open source software. 

A personal highlight for me was our own committee member John Bryant experiencing some technical difficulties at the start of his 5 minute lightning talk about new features in QGIS, and having to speed through the rest of it. He made it with seconds to spare, and got a cheer from the audience. 

What I love most about this particular conference is the ability to network and connect – I really feel it’s the ethos of open source that facilitates the desire to share your ideas, learnings and data with the community. This was such a welcome change from conferences which are geared around sales pitches and profit. 

The organising committee would like to extend a massive thank you to the sponsors of the event, without which we couldn’t hold it. These amazing companies are fostering the availability of powerful software tools to the world and the removal of socio-economic boundaries. 

Special thanks to our venue sponsor FLUX, who allowed us to fill their terrific Basement venue with raucous nerdery for the day. 

And of course an enormous kudos to the organising committee, who put in months of effort to make the event happen (big shout out to John Bryant and Maia Williams).

If you’d like to know more about FOSS4G, check out their website. If you’re interested in getting involved in the event for next year, free to get in touch via email, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Cheers!
Tracey

Sponsors

Organisers
John Bryant
Maia Williams
Tracey Cousens
John Duncan
Bryan Boruff
Sam Wilson
Ivana Ivanova
Nick Middleton
Nimalika Fernando
Daniel Moore
Piers Higgs

Volunteers
Cholena Smart
Keith Moss
Grant Boxer
Petra Helmholz
Rocio Peyronnet
Rachel Pennington
Angus Mackay
Gail Wittich

The post The annual FOSS4G Conference: Celebrating Open Source Software in the Spatial Community appeared first on Gaia Resources.

That’s a mouthful of an acronym or two there, so while I can explain it all – FOSS4G is “Free and Open Source Software For Geospatial” and SoTM is “State of The Map” – the best way to summarise this is to say that it is the conference for the “open source spatial community”.

On Friday, the virtual event rolled out across hubs in the Pacific, New Zealand and Australia, starting with a series of broadcast keynotes across a Zoom conference.  The keynotes were also live streamed on Youtube and you can still watch the live stream via Youtube (also embedded below).

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the livestream keynotes, so I went in with no expectations and found that they were really enjoyable and really excellent quality (even with Zoom).  Tom MacWright talked about the ethics of geospatial and open source, Grayson Cook talked about how there is art in satellite data, Lesley Arnold inspired us about how the open spatial community came together after the fires earlier in 2020, Nathan Woodrow told us that it’s OK to have hobbies and be in the open source game and Litea Biukoto explained about how disaster risk reduction was happening in the Pacific Region.

My favourite was Markus Mannheim, though – who is an ABC data journalist, and you can see his articles on the ABC site here. Markus talked about how it’s important to not lose the message when presenting spatial data – and his “three second rule” that you have to be able to understand a visualisation in three seconds, or it needs reworking.  It seems like “the good old days” of cartographic science (and art) still has something to offer to the modern era!

In Perth, we switched then to a local conference flavour.  We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have lived in an isolated bubble in Western Australia, so we have much fewer restrictions on what we can do than other places in the world.  With a really solid understanding of what we were allowed to do under health guidelines, our Perth organising committee (which I was part of) set out to make the most of what we could safely do.

In Perth, we ran a schedule of lightning talks – 13 talks of 5 minute length – straight after our morning tea which ran after the livestream.  The whole idea was to “energise” the audience and to get them going before lunch, so we had a whole range of presentations on a whole range of topics – and these were guided by the open community vote we had held, as we had too many topics to choose from in the time we had!

Alex from our team presented as part of that on our Dynamic Field Guide challenge, showing the audience what you can do with open source mapping components, as well as open data from the Atlas of Living Australia.  The amount of testing that Alex and the team had done meant that the live demo didn’t even raise the heart rates for those of our team that were attending!

Alex presents his lightning talk on our open Dynamic Field Guides

There were a lot of good presentations in that session, and I think that it got a lot of people interested in how varied and interesting our little Perth open spatial community is – people covered topics including the environment, COVID-19, hydrographic surveying, data, research approaches and all sorts of topics.

After lunch, we split into two streams for the longer 15 minute community presentations, which were again selected based on the community vote.  This was where I ended up in front of an audience again myself, giving a talk titled “How Open Source Created a Company”.  This was a bit of a fun talk for me to write, including a little trip back down memory lane for me, and to really see why open source is important enough for our company to sponsor the Perth hub.  It was also great to talk about our QGIS training courses and free resources and during the course of the day to talk to a bunch of people about ways in which that could help them, or join in with other initiatives.

Tracey took great delight in capturing this “before and after” shot for posterity

Again, the talks in this stream were really varied, covering data, historical maps, the United Nations, open data, open source software, indoor mapping, satellite imagery, and a couple of very, very popular presentations around the use of QField.  I was particularly impressed to see how far this tool has come, and a lot of the discussions in the later sessions seemed to follow on from this.

We rounded off the day with a keynote from Rod Nowrojee, about open data and the responsibility that it brings.  I have had the pleasure of knowing Rod for a long time (as the picture above indicates), and it was great to hear him recap on a range of things that he’s found in his varied career as a public servant in the spatial area.  I know a lot of people appreciated his talk and the insights he gave, as not only was he swamped at the drinks afterwards, but I had multiple conversations around it as well with people.

Rod’s talk had themes around responsible use of open data throughout

 Drinks after the keynote were great – we had a lot of positive vibes and energy around with people really wanting to see some more open spatial events – there were many discussions during the day about getting the niches of our community, like GeoGeeks, SSSI and other “mini-communities” together and see what we can do in the future.  The sponsorship that we had for the conference from Landgate, FLUX, Hydrobiology, Curtin University and ourselves at Gaia Resources certainly gives us options for the future, too.

The local conference was organised by local volunteers, supported by their own employers (or themselves!) – John Bryant, Grant Boxer, John Duncan, Nimalike Fernando, Ivana Ivanova, Keith Moss and myself.  Special mention also needs to be made of Abi Harikumar, a student who volunteered to help us wrangle things on the day – and he went above and beyond to do just that.  As the drinks wound down, we were all a little in awe of what we managed to pull off across the course of the day, but I think the best way to sum it up from my own perspective was just damn proud.  

As I said in my talk, it’s really important that we pitch in and support the open source communities that we work with, as much as we can, and in the ways that best suit our capabilities and position.  So supporting this conference was a no brainer – after all, open source and open data is at the root of Gaia Resources, and unless you look after the roots of something, it doesn’t fare particularly well!

If you’re interested in getting involved in the community, then think about getting involved in the open source spatial community, or drop me a line.  Hopefully, we can put you in touch with a few of the resources and people that are out there and available, and get more people involved in this really supportive, passionate community.

So, as I sit here the day after the conference, writing this with sore feet from racing around all day, and a brain still foggy from a few weeks of lack of sleep, I’m also heading out on a couple of weeks of leave with a real sense of pride to be part of this community, and I can’t wait to see what we can collectively do next.

Piers

The post A day with the open source spatial community appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preliminary findings, from a small sample, included:

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

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

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

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

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

Alex

The post TDWG 2020 Conference – avenues into integration appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Q-Album was developed by Gaia Resources in conjunction with Queensland State Archives to provide a platform where small and medium-sized organisations can share the “gems” in their collections.

Screenshot of the Q-Album home page

The project went live at the start of this year and currently has six organisations contributing content. Q-Album is free for contributors and everyone involved in the project hopes to see this number grow over the coming months.

You can explore Q-Album for yourself here: https://qalbum.archives.qld.gov.au/.

There were other engaging talks at the conference which also discussed the use of technology in the heritage sector. We discussed podcasting, the pros and cons of particular collection management software, and the discrepancy between tourism and heritage tourism. Further topics recognised the importance of volunteers, the challenges of fundraising, and sharing difficult-to-tell stories. Common to all was how museums, large and small are using technology, innovating tools, and looking ahead to the future. You can find abstracts of the presented papers here.

With a conference theme of Environment – Heritage -Sustainability, the talk ‘At the Intersection – Sustainability, Climate Change & Collection Care’ was particularly poignant. Presented by Amanda Pagliarino, Head of Conservation and Registration from Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, the talk informed attendees about recent studies at the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials (AICCM) and the Environmental Guidelines Project. As a past Archivist/Collections Manager, it was encouraging to hear that museums are reflecting on their carbon footprint, adjusting collection care standards accordingly, and democratising their policies.

Thank you to the Historic Ormiston House and others for making the in-person Small Museums Conference possible in 2020! I look forward to staying in touch and engaged with the heritage and museum sector here in Queensland.

As always, if you’d like to know more about this event or if you have perspectives you would like to share on museums in Queensland, then please drop me a line at sarah.aldrich@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook..

Sarah

The post Small Museums Conference 2020 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This years theme was Phytophthora Dieback – Tools for the Future, covering a range of contemporary topics such as recent developments in research and technology, and insights on industry engagement and land management. As with many events during the COVID-19 situation, the conference allowed the opportunity for experts, speakers and attendees to join together in person or online to contribute from local, state and international perspectives.

Some significant highlights for us included:

• the chance to catch up with many of our south coast clients
• learning about their work current practices and future directions, and how Gaia Resources can help
• the potential use of Phytophthora Dieback management practices in other industries, e.g. in managing other soil-borne diseases
• seeing how management goals have shifted over the years in response to previous management outcomes

The best highlight for me was the field trip to the beautiful Wireless Hill Park for a demonstration of Phytophthora Dieback management practices.

Tilo Massenbauer or Tilomass Consulting discusses the dynamics of public behavioural change	A demonstration of sampling a Phytophthora Dieback infested plant specimen
Anigozanthos manglesii at Wireless Hill Park, Perth	Diuris corymbosa at Wireless Hill Park, Perth

If you’d like to know more about our work in this area, please drop me a line at tracey.cousens@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tracey

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The mythical phoenix (source: Wikipedia)

The webinar isn’t a new concept, but it has largely taken the place of conferences and face-to-face workshops all over the world – and fair enough too, because we are necessarily less mobile but there is a lot of great work continuing out there in our industries and important topics to discuss. What I have noticed is a significant increase in the number of available webinars and their accessibility; I am able to attend interesting events hosted in Melbourne, Brisbane or anywhere globally really, from my home office. The accessible nature of the online registration process makes it quick and painless to jump in, and importantly the format opens up more opportunities for mums, dads and remote people to participate.

The webinar experience (Image source: Alexandra Koch)

 
Hats off to the organisers too, I know it is not a simple matter to coordinate and facilitate these events and must take many hours of preparation.

I also have to say the invites are coming into my inbox thick and fast, and I have this extra step in my morning routine now to do a quick review if a webinar is worthwhile to attend. As a team we regularly talk about upcoming events, and often we’ll identify a particular webinar as something more interesting to a colleague’s area of expertise or professional development. For example, this little process has seen our team attend data science workshops like the ones offered by the Western Australia Data Science Innovation Hub (WADSIH) and Machine Learning webinars from Amazon Web Services.

If I can wind the clock back one year, I recall a conference in a regional centre with a “pre-conference workshop” on environmental regulation being held the day before. I couldn’t make the trip that day earlier but asked if it might be made available on-line. I don’t think organisers were even thinking of a remote audience back then, and for this one they simply couldn’t offer a video feed as an option. I can tell you they are now. Conference organisers are adapting quickly to survive; however, by engaging the remote audience I would suspect their audience is scaling up, not down.  Take the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand for instance who have chapters in each State and Territory and would previously advertise their events in capital cities around the country. I wouldn’t usually think to get on a plane for a short workshop in another city, so as interesting and relevant as some of those events were it wasn’t feasible to attend, and dialling in via video conferencing wasn’t really a thing.

Fast forward into the “new normal” and these groups are now running regular webinars available to anyone, anywhere. There is sometimes a small fee, or a non-member price, that I am happy to pay where I can see value. There is also the environmental value of reduced carbon emissions for people not needing to commute to meeting places. We’ve touched on this in a previous blog entry from our company’s working-from-home perspective (and we’ll post more about that soon), but for webinars it could be thought of more broadly as a cumulative benefit across industries.

The networking aspect is another important challenge to look at. As you can imagine it is tougher to get those break-out conversations going following an intriguing presentation – and so it will be interesting to see if the traditional webinar format evolves to incorporate this aspect, and I am sure the usual technology providers are already pivoting their products. I actually went along to one of the EIANZ events in Darwin (while practicing good social distancing) for a presentation from the Northern Territory government on ‘What’s new for the NT in environmental impact assessment.’ I found out today that there were somewhere in the range of 70 online participants representing every State and Territory! It was really interesting to see the positive and proactive policy and administrative changes being put in place around environmental assessment following the establishment of the NT Environmental Protection Act (2019).

The onset of this pandemic has really challenged the way we work and our ability to connect and stay in touch with the rest of the world. I have been able to attend a number of webinars here from my base in Darwin that previously have been only offered through physical attendance. It has certainly broadened my horizons, and it seems that organisations are ramping up their presence in this online space, recognising there is an audience beyond their own borders and improving on the “old ways” of working!

Tell us about your own experience with webinars, and feel free to leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this post, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Current biodiversity initiatives in Australia appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

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