A GIS Health Check involves a process of investigation and discovery of an organisation’s Geographic Information System.  It includes a set of stakeholder interviews coupled with a hands-on exploration of the GIS data and software. It also considers other aspects of the broader system environment; but, at the end of the day, what are the benefits of a GIS Health Check? 

Well, let me explain by giving you an example. 

Think of the uses your company makes of spatial information. Can you identify any pain points, or areas where you think things could be done more effectively? Throughout the process, these are the key business problems we want to come back to, to ensure that whatever is recommended, is aimed at delivering real benefit and value. These may be things that jump out straight away in interviewing stakeholders, or they may be more stealthily embedded issues that need more analysis and thinking. Before we think about the solution, it is critical that the GIS Health Check identifies the problems that need to be solved. 

During a GIS Health Check, we consider five elements: People, Processes, Data, Software and Hardware. When these elements are appropriately resourced and working together effectively, we can say we have a healthy GIS system. However, if one (or more) element is not operating efficiently, or is lacking focus in the organisation, there are problems in the organisations’ workflow.

Each organisation has a different aim when requesting a GIS Health Check. For some, a major issue is about historical data management and a resulting lack of structure in the database system (e.g. layer naming, authoritative sources, accessibility). Others might be more interested in improving their processes, writing documentation on them and making sure all the GIS stakeholders are aware and brought into a consistent framework. There are companies that think the software they are using might not be the best fit for their work, or that alternative products may be available that will deliver better value and efficiency. Most of the time, it is a combination of issues from the different elements. 

So when it comes down to an individual GIS Health Check – what do we at Gaia Resources actually do? Even though the objectives are different for each organisation, the approach is pretty much the same. We start by checking the current state of the system: we interview all the GIS users in the company, in order to identify what is working well and where are the ongoing issues. We also get inside your system to ‘lift the hood’ and evaluate the organisations’ spatial data and how it is organised, checking for duplicate files, naming conventions and degree of adoption, folder structures, software used, key business processes supported by spatial information, and many other aspects. 

We also tap into the knowledge of the organisation’s stakeholders, to understand the business context, related strategy objectives and to gain an understanding of how staff think their Geographic Information System should evolve. Basically, what does the future state look like?

Based on our review of the current and desired future state, we put our thinking caps on to brainstorm and provide recommendations. These are meant to improve the future state of the company’s GIS environment, and provide tangible strategies and actions for getting there. The recommendations are classified in terms of  priority, estimated effort and category (e.g. the 5 GIS environment elements covered above). 

Gaia Resources has conducted a significant number of these GIS health checks over the years, as mentioned in this blog. Some of our clients are IGO, Redbank Copper, MBS Environmental, OEPA and recently, Carbon Neutral. We keep in touch with these organisations, and with some we continue to support them with QGIS training and software development. 

Having been through the process, and really benefiting from the previous GIS Health Checks deliverables, I took a page out of our own book so to speak and developed a guideline on “How to deliver a GIS Health Check.” We reviewed previous projects and identified all the common points for a successful Health Check. That guideline is now a resource for our Data Science team and project managers who will no doubt be helping more organisations in the future. 

To summarise (and answer my first question), having your GIS checked can bring many long-lasting benefits, from improving workflow efficiency and consistency, to enhancing decision making and building capabilities in your team. We help organisations achieve this by working with them to focus on the key business challenges where spatial information can play a role. 

If you think the GIS environment in your organisation could do with a review, reach out and start a conversation with us via email, or through our social media platforms –  Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. We are here to help!

Rocio

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[Caveat – I cannot claim to be an expert in either environmental science or remote sensing disciplines, but I know there are many of us in the same boat. It’s tricky to keep track of it all, so I thought if I shared some information and tricks on how to use this data then hopefully I can give a few people a leg up.]

Satellites and remote sensing have played an important role for decades in monitoring land cover change, marine and climate conditions; but developments in this field have increased dramatically in recent years. New satellite platforms, cloud computing, computational capabilities, and free and open access data have allowed scientists and researchers to get their hands on more and more data ready to use for particular environmental applications. 

There are some heavy hitting satellites out there that scientists and researchers would know and love – or hate depending on their context! MODIS, Landsat and Sentinel platforms (outlined in the table below) provide imagery at different resolutions, multispectral band combinations and revisit frequencies. For example, a scientist concerned with bushfire risk may leverage all three in different contexts to provide temporal and spatial coverage across such a complex issue spanning vegetation condition, climate/weather and fuel loads. For other applications, one can get a lot out of one satellite platform. 

Table 1: Overview specifications of some of the most popular satellite platforms used for environmental monitoring applications.

Spectral band comparison between Landsat 5 (TM), Landsat 7 (ETM+), Landsat 8 and 9 (OLI, OLI-2).

The Landsat mission spans six decades, and an archive of free historical imagery archives is readily available going back as far as 1972. With each launch – most recently Landsat 9 in September, 2021 – NASA have made progressive improvements in technology and spectral parameters while maintaining data consistency and a long-term monitoring record. Landsat 9, for instance, includes the same spatial resolution but with higher radiometric resolution (14-bit quantization compared to 12-bit for Landsat 8). This allows sensors to detect more subtle differences, especially over darker areas such as water or dense forests. For instance, Landsat 9 can differentiate 16,384 shades of a given wavelength, compared to 4,096 shades in Landsat 8, and 256 shades in Landsat 7 (source: USGS).

What I find amazing is how close these satellites’ orbits really are to us – at between 700-800km altitude, these things are imaging the Earth at a horizontal equivalent less than the distance between Sydney and Melbourne, and whizzing past at 26,972 km/hr!

GIS packages like QGIS and other analytics platforms can ingest and visualise satellite data in a number of formats. You can either download the imagery directly from their online portals – such as the USGS Earth Explorer and the Copernicus Open Access Hub – or connect to web map services in the form of WMS and WMTS layer types.

QGIS shows a Landsat 9 imagery for Perth (left) with the higher resolution Sentinel-2 imagery (right).

The QGIS plugin repository contains a number of freely available plugins offering access to satellite base map services, and others with easy to use facilities to search and download the raw imagery for analysis. Still others offer spatial layers derived from these satellite sources – and the NAFI plugin we developed is one of the many 

Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a platform we’ve started to use for analysis and visualisation of geospatial datasets, and it is accessible for academic, non-profit, business and government users. We were able to process large volumes of imagery to detect changes in forest cover and vigour against a long-term baseline (read more about that project here). GEE hosts publicly available satellite imagery with historical earth images going back more than forty years. The images are available globally, and ingested on a daily basis to really make it powerful for monitoring and prediction applications. It also provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and other resources like Jupyter Notebooks scripts to enable the analysis of large volumes of data.

Earth on AWS is another source of open data that helps you discover and share datasets for geospatial workloads. AWS Marketplace has a large number of geospatial, GIS and location-based applications that can benefit planning, predictive modelling and mapping applications. 

This movement towards free and open-source satellite data – and the growth of enabling platforms – offers incredible opportunities for environmental scientists, encouraging new questions to be explored at regional and continental scales.

At a talk organised by the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods (RIEL) back in 2019, I was introduced to a few lesser known satellite platforms that have plenty to offer for environmental monitoring. The table below provides a just a bit of a snapshot, but I am certain there are many more out there and I am only scratching the surface:

Table 2: Overview of other satellites used for environmental monitoring. Links are provided to specifications and available products.

The Himawari satellite viewer (link) provides a continental scale animation of weather systems. Cyclone Anika is shown crossing the Western Australia Kimberley region.

Remote sensing and Earth Observation is a whole world (sorry, pun intended) of specialised science and data unto itself. There is so much research out there, but also some practical analysis and visualisation tools to help people in the environment space apply these resources to real-world applications. I must admit the more I dig into different satellite platform websites and their data products, the more I discover that could be valuable. I hope I’ve been able to give people a sense of the potential out there, and we’ll also think about building some of this content into a QGIS training module in the near future. 

Contact us via email or start a conversation with us on one of our social media platforms –  Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Chris

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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.

These projects cover a wide range of GIS tasks our team have been involved in, including data management, basic and complex processing, database creation, GIS strategy, spatial plugin development and yes, making maps!

We’ve been helping the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) in support of a few important initiatives, including:

• The Region Estuaries Initiative (REI) is a “program to improve the health of six estuaries in the South West.” Our objective here was to create a map of the regional catchment group boundaries for estuaries alongside other data collated from the catchment groups.
• We provided quality control resources for the Department’s Healthy Rivers program, which was setup to “collect and interpret data on rivers and their catchments, and use the knowledge gained to support development of strategies to best protect the environment.” Through this comes the creation of the River Reaches spatial layer shown below. With well over 50 areas mapped quality control using a documented process becomes a major part of ensuring consistency and a high level of quality. This essentially requires the use of numerous GIS processes ranging from automated geometry checks to manual spot checks on attributes and linework.

Gaia Resources have had a great partner in Robin Connolly from Hydrologia, who has been sending through a number of small projects involving data processing tasks and map production for their surface water hydrology reports. This work often covers aspects of stormwater management, flood risk and environmental impact assessment around mine sites and other infrastructure. Our role as his extended GIS team is to source data and work through how best to represent options and hydrological modelling results with numerous other themes for each area. For more information have a look at our projects summary.

We had the opportunity recently to do a deep dive into the GIS system at Garnet Mining Australia (GMA) and help them to set up a best practice spatial environment for their core business workflows. This started with our standard GIS health check followed by the migration of data to a cloud-hosted database. We helped GMA to design file and folder naming conventions, and built up a guideline and set of procedures to help them easily manage their spatial data into the future.

This will create a more seamless experience for their workflows by using QGIS desktop GIS software to discover and load the most up-to-date information. Next up we will provide QGIS refresher training to GMA staff and a comprehensive handover of their new setup. In these difficult times with COVID-19 restrictions affecting businesses everywhere, we are looking at maintaining social distancing with a remote training session and combining classroom style training with our free online video tutorials.

Our software developers even got in on the act with GIS software this year when we worked with the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC) to rebuild their QGIS plug-in for layer discovery and automated map production. Have a look at our previous blog about that project.

A special mention should also be given to our GIS analysts’ work on the recently released Retromaps website, where we carefully stitched together over 2000 georeferenced sewerage scheme plans from past decades. That website has been a big hit for the public to check out building outlines and historical mapping from their own neighbourhoods, and our blog from last week provides more detail on the work involved.

If you’d like to know more about GIS and our work in this space, please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via jake.geddes@gaiaresources.com.au.

Jake

The post All things Spatial! 🌏 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

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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

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It’s a great question and gets at the core of a lot of the work I’ve been involved in over the last 15yrs on both sides of the fence helping government and proponents to limit environmental impacts – particularly in relation to approvals, reporting and compliance.

A common theme at the NT Resources Week back in September – and again in conversation at the Territory NRM conference in Darwin – was that we live in a time of rapidly changing and evolving technology, and this represents major challenges for the regulators and proponents alike to communicate and report on projects, and to weave their way through environmental risks from the approvals stage through to closure.

The chairman of the NTEPA – Paul Vogel – at NT Resources Week discussing key issues and opportunities in environmental regulation.

It was presentations by Paul Vogel (NTEPA) and others that brought a few things home to me about how environmental technology  – including emerging opportunities in data science and machine learning  – can make a difference. Here’s some of the ways in which we have helped organisations such as regulators and resource companies, including:

• System health checks,
• New and improved data sources,
• Monitoring and automated reporting,
• System development, and 
• Data analytics and data science.

Some thoughts on these areas follow.

System health checks

We can undertake independent reviews of how well an organisation’s technology systems are performing in the areas of data collection and discovery, software and automation, hardware and processes (like we did for the Independence Group and the WA Office of the Environmental Protection Agency). These health checks are ways in which technology can reduce operating costs for environmental regulatory processes.

One of the key parts of this approach is our independence at Gaia Resources – we are not resellers of any software, so we can recommend the best of breed solutions to our clients.

New and improved data sources

Data is being collected in unprecedented volumes, with organisations involved in applications for water and soil quality monitoring, ground disturbance tracking, logistics, energy efficiency etc. Sensors on the waterways, on vehicles, drones and on satellites, or behind the electricity meter, are all gathering massive amounts of time series data to monitor our environment.

We keep a close eye on new sources of data – such as remote sensing products and sensor data – that might benefit regulators (and indeed, any of our clients) through integration for their compliance monitoring programs.  Some recent ones we’ve found include:

• Weather and metocean data for field sample analysis, 
• Smart Cities sensors (like at the City of Darwin) for heat, dust and air quality, 
• Satellite imagery (e.g. Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) for vegetation cover, health and flooding,
• Drone data products for site compliance and risk assessment,
• Broadscale data products from Digital Earth Australia for regional assessments.

Through our products like GRID, we also provide managed services where we provide these sorts of new data source to our clients as layers in that web mapping solution that they can then use across their operations.

Open data products from Digital Earth Australia (Geoscience Australia) like mangrove cover and intertidal extents can easily be brought into GRID and other GIS packages for monitoring projects (Source: National Map).

Monitoring and Automated Reporting

Whether we are talking about land clearing, air quality or other metrics, this is about using the aggregated data sources (including smart data sensors and field data) to assist the regulators and proponents to improve the accuracy of their work, and save time and money through push-button reporting. In turn, the regulator receives more accurate, consistent and timely reports against environmental conditions and thresholds – benefiting the environment. 

Recent advances in remote sensing offer a powerful tool to answer the question “Are we having the minimal impact we said we were going to have?” Imagery from free (or near free) satellite platforms can now give us a snapshot every few days about land disturbance, vegetation health, soil moisture, dust and other factors. Drone imagery offers another more localised dimension to site monitoring capabilities – and drones can of course do other things, as we have found in our work with Wildlife Drones. 

System Development

Regulators often have processes that may or may not have systems to support them – online systems can simplify and standardise the submission of data, like Environmental Impact Assessment data, which has the benefit of streamlining processes – and this can also deal with one of the pain points I’ve heard from both regulators and proponents around understanding the status of an application.

Data Analytics and Data Science

Using the knowledge of past disturbance and a range of aggregated environmental data, the environmental impact of a current application can be assessed against a broad range of potential impact variables (see our previous blog on this topic, focusing on cumulative impacts).  With advances in data science, machine learning and big data, predictive modelling is becoming more and more realistic for regulators to take up and use in their operations.

If you’d like to know more about our work in the environmental regulation space, or want to share your ideas on how we could be further leveraging new technologies in this area, then please feel to start a conversation on any of the regular channels ( Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook) or send me an email on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

The post Technology and Environmental Regulation appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Obligatory photo I took of Uluru at sunset (left) – which I must say was spectacular from this vantage point and around the base (no – I didn’t climb). An example of Geoscience Australia hardcopy maps (right – source: Geoscience Australia).

They still offer their widely used digital map products of course, but while our car passed through the spinifex spotted plains and dirt tracks heading to telegraph stations, meteorite craters and memorials, this news filled me with a sense of sadness and resignation, in the same way one might feel about the passing of a former Prime Minister or great author. There is a lot of history tied up in topographic maps, and many stories and discoveries to be made as one passes their finger from where they are to where they could go. Some might say you get a bigger picture with a hardcopy map, a broader perspective on the landscape. However, I like so many of us tend not to feel the need for hardcopy maps anymore. In saying that, I can vividly remember when they were essential kit.

Anyone over 25 years of age probably remembers the UBD and how indispensable that was for getting around the city and suburbs, or finding that elusive house party? How many of us, upon getting our first car,  received one of these map books as a present from a wise friend or relative? Now of course all that content is reliably available on our phones at the press of a button. Or is that actually true? Let’s ignore the 2012 Apple Maps debacle for the time being… When you think of remote area travel, and battery charging, the digital content is not available all the time really is it? Although this is something we work on with our own apps at Gaia Resources – but more on that later.

Now back to the recap on my trip – I’ve just left Aileron Roadhouse (with its seriously impressive 17m high Man on the Hill  and equally impressive Anmatjere Woman and Child sculptures). We’ve already passed through Alice Springs after having camped at a spectacular spot called the Ellery Creek Big Hole in the West McDonnell National Park.

The 17m high sculpture of the Man on the Hill (left) and the Woman and child (right) puts Aileron Roadhouse on the map! Worth a stop.

This is a unique place of twisted folding rocks surrounding a water hole that would make any geologist forget how cold the water is and jump straight in to get to the other side (I feel a chicken joke coming on).

The Ellery Creek Bighole in the McDonnell Ranges was a seriously gnarly place 400 million years ago, and pretty impressive results today.

So within 2 minutes of driving north from Aileron we are again out of mobile data range, and I instinctively pull out the Australia Road and 4WD Atlas to reflect on the last few days travel and to look ahead. Yep, back to the hard copy map. In fact, the map book has been pulled out so many times now and used a way to discuss sealed and unsealed route options, distances and interesting spots to have lunch or stay overnight. It’s a way of sharing stories with fellow travellers at the pub and at the campground – friendly people who have been where you are going and can impart local knowledge of road conditions, food options and the value of taking a small detour to relax in one of many waterholes spotted through the truly massive Northern Territory.

 Our camping set-up at Devils Marbles (left) and the girls in my life relaxing at sunset. One of those magical places you might have driven past if it weren’t for someone at your campsite sharing their story.
Below: Play time! A Big Red joey kangaroo was being fostered at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre.

Using a map to share stories reminds me of the Australian indigenous people who have been doing something very similar for a lot longer than topographic maps have been around. We stepped in to look at a number of aboriginal art galleries on our trip into the Red Centre including at Uluru and Tennant Creek (the latter gallery had this little trooper at left as the main attraction).

It’s fascinating to learn how different regions use different styles of dot painting to share stories of the landscape, food (bush tucker) and water sources, and special meeting places.  In the  Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre in Tennant Creek for instance, we got to meet the female artists of the Barkely Region who paint circular patterns representing soaks (near surface water sources), bush tucker (grubs, ants, goannas) and medicinal plants.

In the region around Uluru, painting on canvas is relatively new but the women of the Anangu Uwankaruku Punu often combine dot paintings with the beautiful swaying leaf patterns representing medicinal plants like the Irmangka-Irmangka which is used as a sticky gel for tea, application on the chest for colds and headaches, or on bites and stings.

Groups around the Central Desert regions often employ the patchwork dot painting pattern I really like as a map geek because it practically represents an aerial interpretation of the landscape and different vegetation assemblages of their region. I can almost imagine the way in which their art serves a very practical purpose and focal point to educate and share knowledge.

I’m not saying that hardcopy topographic maps have been rendered to the status of a historical archive or art work – in fact we see old maps being re-used and delivering new insights to current challenges including the work Jake in our team has done previously with the State Records Office and their historical map archives. Visualisation of historical map features changing over time can help us understand the history of places and how cities grew and evolved. Government agencies are realising that their aerial imagery and cadastral map archives are treasure troves of information to help with planning decisions, genealogical enquiries and archaeological studies.

It’s been a long time since Gaia Resources had a plotter in the corner of the office pumping out large-scale maps for our clients – but it used to be all about those A0 and A1 plots depicting our client’s survey data, landuse and satellite imagery, unrolled fresh off the plotter and straight into a meeting of scientists and decision makers. As a spatial company in the early days, Piers would tell you we lived and breathed that kind of work.

These days we get more involved in system development and mobile applications with mapping functionality that depend on digital products like those from Geoscience Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology, and State government portals. Leveraging the Digital Earth Australia products for our NRM clients GRID web mapping system and Here as the base for the desktop app we’ve built for Wildlife Drones are good examples.

We have also pumped a fair amount of research and development into building an offline maps capability in our mobile applications – recognising that base maps like the 250k Topographic Series, Here, Google Maps and Mapbox offer offline APIs and are in demand for our clients working out beyond mobile range. In some cases – like for our Health department clients monitoring mosquitoes – it is actually as much about being offline in an urban environment where the field workforce can still collect location-specific field data using devices without SIM cards or wifi coverage.

Jake from our team near Tom Price demonstrating a Fulcrum-based project for the Banjima Rangers (left). Field data capture and access to base maps can be challenging when you are deep in the Western Australian bushland (right).

On reflection, what I think you realise as a mapping professional is that you haven’t given up on those hardcopy maps – you have been part of a story of their evolution into something that continues to have great relevance in people’s lives. I love hearing about a new insight from an old map made digital, or a new digital product that could be a game changer for our clients – just as much as I still enjoy thumbing over towns and tracks on my 4WD Atlas as I travel around this big red continent.

If you’d like to know more about our work with historical maps, or how we can deliver digital mapping products, systems and mobile apps to help with your business, then please feel to start a conversation on any of the regular channels ( Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook) or send me an email on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

The post Are hardcopy maps a thing of the past? appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Day 1-2: Savanna Fire Forum 

The first two days focused around savanna burning, carbon abatement and carbon sequestration, with key themes including:

• Sharing stories and knowledge
• International, national and regional initiatives
• New sequestration methodologies
• Monitoring and evaluation
• New developments and training
• Panel discussion with the industry leaders

Gaia Resources has some experience in supporting groups who get involved in the fire management industry, such as our friends in the RangelandsNRM group, Conservation Management (through their work with the Pilbara based Banjima Ranger group) and Bushfire Prone Planning; but I must admit this forum was an eye-opener in terms of the breadth of experience and capabilities, and wide range of stakeholders in this sector. The following are just some of my thoughts and observations from the perspective of an interested data scientist new to the Top End – so feel free to point out if I’ve misrepresented anything.

Hundreds of professionals packed the lecture theatre at Charles Darwin University to hear industry experts talk about a range of Savanna Fire topics.

Carbon abatement in this context refers to the avoidance of large-scale severe fires that destroy woody vegetation, but paradoxically the way to achieve that is to burn stuff, albeit in a controlled way. Across the north of Australia this woody vegetation represents a massive carbon sink – actively taking carbon out of the atmosphere and helping to offset our nation’s emissions from other sources. It is almost counter-intuitive to think that a program of burning would help in the fight against climate change (seeing as that burning itself releases carbon), but through better land management practices involving the controlled burn-off of fuel load (mainly grasses) at the right time of year – Indigenous ranger groups and their industry partners are able to reduce the severity and destruction of bushfires later at the driest time of the year. In fact, savanna burning is something that our indigenous people have been doing for thousands of years!

Caring for country and the opportunity to get back onto the land was a strong recurring theme in the stories that were shared by ranger groups. So although I’ll talk about the science and the data and the policy later in this article, what really matters to the people on the ground is their connection to the land and the chance to contribute to the health and sustainability of land and culture for future generations. The conference was a great chance for ranger groups to share their stories, such as how birds of prey intentionally light fires to flush out wildlife.

Mimal Land Management has been managing fire for many years – this video talks about a bird they call Karrkanj (or “troublemaker”) who picks up burning sticks and flies to a fresh piece of grass to drop it. 

The conference really seemed like a win-win situation to me how the Commonwealth government is funding programs that helped to provide meaningful employment, reduce carbon emissions and support Indigenous culture and way of life. Striking the balance between the environmental, social and economical outcomes looked to be a big challenge, but one well worth the effort.

The key point from an environment perspective is that late dry season fires after about 1 August tend to be hotter and more destructive to the savanna landscape than the early dry season fires; or, put another way, if leaves and grasses can be burnt early in the dry season, then the carbon-sucking trees and big shrubs can hopefully live on for another year. Some of the presentations at the forum talked about project monitoring and evaluation, and the analyses that could demonstrate the effectiveness of conducting early season burns to prevent – or reduce destruction of – late season burns. Bar graphs abounded in the presentations showing program effectiveness through ratios of early season to late season percentages by year, and the so called “M-curve” was another graphical way that caught my attention to demonstrate how active fire management practices were making a difference. The statistics in this case were based on areas calculated from satellite imagery of projects across the Cape York Peninsula.

Natural Carbon presented aggregated fire scar area data for projects across the Cape York Peninsula and across areas with different land management intent, demonstrating in their M-curves that early dry season burning reduced late season fires.

The situation on the ground is more complex with many variables at play. For a start there’s a coverage problem, the vast areas of land we are talking about here can’t be burnt off with the limited number of people and resources available – so ranger groups need to think strategically and make informed decisions through mapping of fire history and estimating fuel load. This is all about mapping risk and making operational decisions, and it was encouraging to see that ranger groups were actively using satellite imagery resources such as the NAFI (North Australia Fire Information) website. NAFI offers time-series fire scar mapping and hotspot locations based on NOAA and NASA MODIS satellite data – with analysis and data management from Landgate, Geoscience Australia, the Darwin Centre for Bushfires Research and from Cape York Peninsula Sustainable Futures. Mapping the landscape in terms of years unburnt (as a proxy for fuel load) for instance could be one of tools to help prioritise where to apply limited resources.

The NAFI web map (left) provides a range of fire history layers for visualisation and data download, including fire scars by month, and the number of years burnt. The number of map requests (right) has seen a big uptick in recent years.

Weather and climate trends are major factors that influence fire frequency and behaviour, and also the logistics of carbon abatement projects. As I learnt in the forum, drying climate trends and weather patterns can narrow the time window available for controlled burning, and shift limited resources into a fire suppression mode (eg. bushfire fighting). The fire mapping from NAFI again becomes important for fire suppression planning, as (I suspect) does rainfall data, the location of fire breaks, roads and tracks. Radar and near real-time lightning strike data (from the Bureau of Meteorology and Landgate) could also be important operational information; for example, in one presentation we heard that storms can build up in one region without dropping any precipitation, and as the system passes through the lightning strikes ignite many small fires that need early attention.

Fire scar mapping with an overlay of fire breaks shows the effectiveness – or otherwise in some cases – of these suppression techniques.

The subject of weeds – and in particular Gamba grass – came up over and over as a major factor influencing the severity and behaviour of fires in Australia’s north. This tall grass was originally introduced in the 1930’s as a cattle feed but it has since infested an estimated 1.5 million hectares of the Northern Territory alone and is one of 32 weeds of national significance. Fires are so severe where Gamba grass infestations are present that they can burn up to 9 times higher than native grass fires, and as a result the cost of controlling these types of fires is significantly higher (source: Gamba Grass Roots). The Northern Territory Weeds Management Branch have a Statutory Weed Management Plan for Gamba grass requiring landowners to report and remove it. For more information including maps of the weed’s distribution can be found on their website.

Grey Mackay from RangelandsNRM presented on fire management programs that organisation was coordinating in the Dampier Peninsula and Kimberley region of Western Australia, and some GIS visualisation wizardry to bring focus on the temporal change and relationship between early dry season and late dry season fires. After his talk, Grey and I used morning tea to check out the landscape model visualisations that Rohan Fisher from Charles Darwin University Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods had on show (more info on: https://www.landscapemodels.net ).

GIS software transparencies (left) to show different years of late dry season (LDS) fires in red and early dry season (EDS) fires in green (Courtesy of Grey Mackay). Rohan Fisher (right) explains his 3D printed landscape models and visualisation of bushfire spreading.

Rohan also presented the imagery resources available from the Sentinel-2 platform which consists of two satellites from the European Space Agency (ESA). This relatively new entrant on the satellite remote sensing scene offers free 10m resolution and 13 band multispectral imagery every 5 days over a given patch of ground. The increased resolution over Landsat imagery (at 30m) is quite significant, because it allows people working in this industry to see much more detail in the landscape. For instance, they can better assess the impact of fire breaks and the degree of fire ‘patchiness’ which might be used to understand the effectiveness of fire burning programs. Other fire-related applications are also possible with this information, including the study of remnant wildlife habitats and assessment of biodiversity impacts.

Bushfire burning in January, 2019 west of Alice Springs Northern Territory (source: Sentinel-2 from SnapPlanet)

If you haven’t seen it already the Sentinel Hub website is an excellent resource brought to us by Sinergise to help bring tailored web map services into a GIS application or website. You can use the free web map interface to specify date ranges, select off-the-shelf band combinations like True Colour,  NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index), Moisture Content and others. Sinergise also built a QGIS plug-in for accessing Sentinel imagery where you can get direct access to dates of imagery, minimum cloud cover and band combinations for use in desktop mapping. With a SentinelHub subscription you can set up your own custom web services and generate time series animations (GIFs) over your area of interest. As an aside, our team at Gaia Resources is constantly finding new ways of using these tools and the Sentinel-2 products (check out these blogs where we’ve discussed some of these).

Day 3 – Emissions Reduction Fund workshop

The third day was a separate workshop many of the same industry professionals attended which was more focused on the accounting and policy side of carbon abatement and sequestration. The Department of Environment and Energy  (DoEE) hosted the workshop at the Hilton Hotel in Darwin and reviewed changes to the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). The ERF “supports Australian businesses, farmers and land managers to take practical actions to reduce emissions and improve the environment”. As a bit of history (I am just coming up to speed with), in 2015 the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011 was amended to bring in the ERF which built on the Carbon Farming Initiative, expanding coverage to encourage emissions reduction across the Australian economy.

DoEE provides climate change advice to the Government, and delivers policies and programs like the ERF methods to reduce emissions and increase renewable energy uptake. The Clean Energy Regulator (CER) – who were co-presenting at the workshop – assess and administer carbon projects under the ERF, and assess project carbon credit reporting. Carbon abatement through controlled burning is one of many types of activities – or Methods as they are referred to – that are eligible for carbon credits (see this link for more info).

The workshop covered the two most recent savanna fire management methods that came in to force in April 2018 – credits emissions avoidance and carbon sequestration in dead organic matter. It was a good chance for me as a relative beginner in this space, to hear about how Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) are calculated, and differences between the 2015 and 2018 methods.  There was a healthy debate and discussion from attendees as the presenters moved through a number of topics, including:

• The consultative method of establishing the 2015 methods, and the different way the 2018 methods were brought on board,
• The option of converting existing savanna fire management projects to the 2018 version or keeping them as is,
• The Savanna Burning Abatement Tool (SavBAT3) as a GIS web map that automates the processes and mathematical equations for estimating net abatement for projects,
• Challenges around proponents being able to calculate baselines at project registration,
• The importance of demonstrating Eligible Interest Holder consent (eg. permission from Native Title holders, pastoralists and other groups with legal land rights).
• The role of declared weeds and the need to excise infestation areas from reporting (and the potential this process could be a disincentive to proponents),

As I mentioned earlier, being new to this industry meant that there was a lot to take in across the three days (and I’ve probably missed some important messages), but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience to meet new people and to hear their stories. It was also perhaps a chance to apply a fresh perspective to an evolving industry; despite the many ways in which the carbon industry is using satellite imagery and GIS – there seems to me to be a lot more potential there for technology and data science to make a difference. If you’d like to talk about it in more detail hit up our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts – or drop me a line on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

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In spatial technology, the word “topology” is all about the building blocks of geometry. Like other ‘ology’ words (e.g. geology and biology) it has its root in the study of something – and in this case we are talking about the study of geometrical properties and spatial relationships between constituent parts of a shape or a set of related shapes. Topology considers anything from the individual feature to the relationship between features. Individual features can be in the form of points, lines or polygons. Furthermore a polygon can be broken down into its constituent nodes/vertices, segments/edges and faces (see schematic below). Topology usually deals with the way in which features interact with adjacent or connecting features.

A 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional shape consists of different geometry types (Source: Cc-by-sa-3.0)

The job of maintaining topologically consistent data is critical if you are in the business of using spatial data to do anything beyond make basic maps; for example, accurately calculating area of different vegetation types in a study area.  Encompassing this process is a huge range of software, tools, and features that enable users to maintain a healthy dataset or database – and we’ve been crazy dedicated enough to go through these for you. Scroll down to find out how you can get a handle on your funky topology.

Topology Errors

In your GIS travels you may come across a number of topology errors, each with their own whirlwind of disaster! Sometimes the topology issue is not easy to spot until you try and run a geoprocessing tool and it just falls over with a generic error message. The problem is often so small and at such a minute scale, that you wouldn’t know it is a problem until you get these errors trying to work with the geometry.

Example of how ET Geowizards software deals with overlapping polygons (Source: ET SpatialTechniques).

Some of the common topology errors include:

• Overlaps – where polygons overlap each other (and they should not),
• Gaps – where there is dead space between polygons (but there should not be),
• Slivers – our favourites, caused by tiny little pieces not matching up,
• Dangles – where lines hang over the edge of something, and,
• Bowties – where there’s been issues from the digitising of the data and polygons are self-intersecting.

Depending on the purpose of your data, there are several other error types you can look for with the topology software and tools available.

If you encounter any of these it is probably safe to say any further analysis on the data will create more problems, and you need to get that stuff fixed up!

Quantum GIS (QGIS)

QGIS (a free and open source GIS package) has a topology checker tool built into its core product. Users are able to set specific rules which will point to that error’s location and allow you to focus on it and fix it. This can be more of a manual task of fixing one error at a time from the list generated, but very helpful nevertheless considering that some of these errors could be tiny.  I had the pleasure of working on one native wildlife habitat project with over 25,000 errors in one dataset, and I should point out there are ways of streamlining these tools to efficiently deal errors of that scale.

Example of the topology checker tool in QGIS

Check out our QGIS video tutorials where we go through this tool and others. There are also new tools in version 3.x to ensure topology is digitised correctly and errors are kept to a minimum.

The added bonus with QGIS is the multiple GIS software packages and plug-ins that extend the core product. This opens up other avenues in order to investigate topology tools for your particular purpose.  In particular, check out GRASS “v.clean” in the QGIS processing toolbox!

ArcGIS

ArcGIS is a leading proprietary GIS desktop software and has multiple tools for establishing topology rules, as well as checking and fixing errors. Using topology features in ArcGIS requires an  upgrade to the middle tier license – called Standard – that comes at an additional price to the Basic product.

There are excellent topology tools and workflows that can be used to setup new data or import existing data – embedding specific topological rules (i.e. no gaps, no overlaps, etc.) so by the end of your project you will be the proud owner of topologically correct data.

Other commercial software out there also deals with topology issues in a range of other ways.

ET GeoWizards

ET GeoWizards is an extension tool for ArcGIS as well as having its own standalone software product. It has a once-off cost – a relatively small investment for something that we consider to be good value for money. This link will give you an overview of what ET GeoWizards offers in terms of topology and how it goes about identifying, maintaining, and fixing topology errors.

For the functionality and quality of output that ET GeoWizards offers to ArcGIS Basic users out there the relatively low price point is justified in our opinion.

PostGIS

PostGIS is a free and open source spatial database software that includes a small number of topology tools. It’s a bit more complex than the ‘usual’ desktop tools, but it’s worth reviewing for larger corporate systems.  Check them out here!

So what?

So, you’ve come to the realisation that you have a (topology) problem. Great! You’ve accepted the challenge and your data is on the road to recovery; so, which toolset is best for you? Well, there’s a bunch of different ways in which these software packages can be used on their own or in combination to deal with different topology issues; as shown below:

Matching topology needs and software in a “simple” diagram

We have come across multiple instances where datasets needed some topology love (click here for project examples). Depending on the use case the software chosen usually stood up to the task and in some workflows the process could be automated.  In our disturbance mapping work for various mining companies for instance, their tenements, disturbance and various other datasets were overlapping and convoluted in ways that made it impossible for them to get an accurate a reliable snapshot and statistics for environmental reporting.  With a mixture of ET GeoWizards, QGIS, and automated processes we were able to cleanse their data and output a result for the client to report efficiently and effectively.  We also documented the on-going processing that was needed for their team to continue to maintain a topologically clean data store into the future. This is something that we’re working up right now into a separate blog article, focusing on the entire chain from capturing disturbance through to processing results, from start to finish.

If you would like to know more about this subject or how we can help your business understand, cope, or survive topology in GIS, then please drop me a line, or start a conversation on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Jake

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What the heck is FOSS4G you say? It stands for ‘Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial’ – and has been used for over a decade as a label for OSGeo’s international and regional conferences. In case you are wondering, SotM is an acronym for ‘State of the Map.’  We love our acronyms in the spatial industry!

For a bit of fun, we compiled a list of interview questions and got Jake and I to answer them so you could get a flavour for the conference. We hope it inspires you to get involved and maybe come next year to FOSS4G SotM in Wellington, New Zealand…

Q. What made you decide to go across the country for a software conference?
Chris: As a Project Manager and a Spatial Analyst it was important for me to understand the emerging open-source technology components involved in so many of our projects and how different groups were using them, because I think this helps when providing advice to clients and getting a better connection with our developers. I love those rare moments in conversation when my colleagues raise their eyebrows and realise, yeah, I do know a little bit about the tech.  Plus it also tied into a Georabble event where we gave a talk based on our previous threatened species blog!

Jake: As we were Gold sponsors for the event it seemed like a great opportunity to travel across and get involved through the workshops, conference, and various nightly events. I have been a strong believer in free and open source software so to be amongst like minded people in this realm was both humbling and inspiring. It also helps when it’s in Melbourne

Q. Was there a talk that really gets you thinking even days after the conference finished?
Chris: There were a few actually – I was surprised how business-focused many of the talks were compared to some of the off-the-shelf spatial conferences I’ve been to. First of all I thought I was going to be deluged with technical detail, but that wasn’t the case. I guess the bespoke nature of the solutions they were showcasing stemmed from them developing to solve a specific challenge, and only after they had analysed the requirement and understood the nature of the beast. That was quite thought-provoking.

The opening keynote address from Paul Ramsey (“co-founder” of PostGIS) has given us plenty to ponder. Paul has given a similar talk every 2 years to FOSS4G, and lets us in on what keeps open-source software going. He tells us that open-source software only survives if it gets continuous attention (he calls this the Attention economy), and that open-source developers also build up attention capital when they contribute to the product and help out their fellow community members. They become heroes of sorts, and can call on the help of others in times of need.

Paul Ramseys’ keynote address

The cash economy in open-source software is limited – in part because it is um, free – but there are organisations that donate and others that hire core developers to build specific modules or plug-ins to suit their pressing needs. Paul also points out that the value that open-source software provides organisations is something that is underestimated, if not even ignored. I still love the comment that many managers look at software like QGIS and think of it as fairy dust. The message here seemed to be, if you really like if and want it to stick around, give back to the community.

Jake: There are two that have stayed with me since the conference. Kate Crawford’s talk on Moving Through Country: A Community Based Project to Map and Share Indigenous Cultural Perspectives and Kiersten Jowett’s talk on Blockchain is knocking. Will FOSS4G answer? Both were very different but the underlying themes and messages could potentially converge in the future.  Kate Crawford’s project takes a really simple mapping platform (OpenStreetMap) and their team are endeavouring to engage with regional communities in order to build up a wealth of cultural knowledge. There is also the idea for mobile applications, a website, 3D topographic maps, and virtual reality.

Kiersten Jowett’s talk introduced us to Blockchain and its relationship with Cryptocurrency and Miners. They want to dispel the many sceptics and bring Blockchain technology into the open source geospatial community through companies like FOAM, Helium, XYO, and Platin. It is a young and exciting technology and if it used thoughtfully, could be a game changer.

Kate Crawford’s talk about moving through the country was a favourite

Q. Is there anything you learnt that you want to get stuck into straight away?
Chris: Nyall Dawson ran us through a new plug-in called SLYR that I really want to try. This is a style conversion utility for taking those complex symbology libraries from ArcGIS and converting them to QGIS. So for those layers that have hundreds of colour, patch and marker combinations this should make short work of them. I know a few people who are going to get excited about this one. Shout out to SMEC for bringing Nyall on to give that back to the QGIS community.

Jake: The python workshops were an eye opening experience into the many capabilities between QGIS and Python. There is most definitely an opportunity in this space to create smoother workflows, unique tools, and automated tasks.

Q. What was the most inspiring thing you heard while you were there?
Chris: Ooh tough one. Rohan Fisher’s discussion about empowering regional governments in Indonesia with Saga and QGIS training was one that I thought was rather inspiring. When Anne Harper from Koordinates started asking us to think beyond open data portals and consider the full customer experience of open data, I felt she was really onto something there – open data should be more than a click and download approach and there needs to be tools and products to help a wider audience understand what they are grabbing and to help them achieve the outcome they are after.

Jake: Nathan Woodrow’s talk on The evolution of a homegrown QGIS developer showed just how easy it is to get involved in the open source community, specifically QGIS. He went through some life events that had an impact on his QGIS development work, all the while still contributing. It also has to be said that the work put into QGIS was outside of work hours, which just goes to show the commitment and passion he has for this GIS application and the open source community.

Q. Tell us something funny or embarrassing about the trip.
Chris: We ran into Nick Middleton from Western Australia on the first night ice-breaker drinks and proceeded to “network” until past midnight, only to start the conference a bit bleary-eyed at what was effectively 5:30am Perth time. So a great start, and a really good chance to catch up with one of our former GRID clients. He was also cheering us on at our Georabble presentation a couple nights later (which was a recap of our Threatened Species work we blogged about previously) so thanks for the support mate!

Jake: Surely it would have to be the fire alarm incident. The conference was about to kick off, we were being given introductions to the schedule and venue then…..BAM! I think everyone presumed it was a joke until we were instructed to proceed out of the doors and onto the grassed area. It was however a great opportunity to take a group photo.

The group photo (the group didn’t know about it, though)

Q. What does open-source mean to you?
Chris: Well, my understanding is broader now that I have been to this conference. To me open-source is about freely available software, data and tools supported by a community of people who want to share their knowledge and experience with the rest of the world. Government plays a big role in the evolving open data space in my opinion, so the public and businesses can continually derive value from their information assets. Flipping the question on its head, I’ve also realised what ‘We’ should mean to open-source, in that it is only through our contributions and support that software like QGIS, PostGIS, Geoserver, Leaflet, Django and all those gems on GitHub out there thrive and improve over time.

Jake: Open-source has stuck with me ever since my university days. I was amazed at the level of these products and the contributions made by the online communities. Open source also gives everyone the opportunity to engage with products they might not usually have access to. Other words that spring to my mind and should for others are collaboration, innovation, creativity, and openness.

Q. Will you go next year to Wellington, and what do you hope will be new or different there?
Chris: I would like to go, but I would also like to give others in our team a chance to experience it. I think if I could see something focused on next time, it would be about open-source software accessibility and uptake challenges for non-developers. I feel there is a steep learning curve for those of us who can’t read code like a book – QGIS and perhaps Saga being the major exception where a lot of attention has been given to the user interface, tools help and documentation.

Jake: Of course I would love to! I don’t think the open source community is ever short of innovative ideas with the growth of Geospatial free and open source software, so I’m certain there will be some new technologies being explored as well as previous projects taken to a new level of awesomeness!

Note that many of the video recordings are available at https://foss4g-oceania.org/videos and photos from the various events can be viewed at https://foss4g-oceania.org/photos.

Jake and I would be keen to hear what you think on any of these topics, or to catch-up if you were one of the attendees we didn’t get to speak to. A conversation can also be started on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts – or drop us a line on (08) 9227 7309 or email me on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

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