[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.

FOSS4G is short for ‘Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial’ – it’s a great convergence of people who are passionate about open source software and open geospatial data, and want to share their experiences. It’s safe to say we all see the business value and the opportunities for innovation and for creating good in this world through sharing and collaborating.

Maybe you haven’t heard the terms open source or open data before, or perhaps you’ve heard them in comparison to Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) – or proprietary – products? In either case, let’s have a look at what a few of these terms mean:

• Open source software is where the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Often source code will be collaborated on and shared through public channels like GitHub.
• Open Data is the concept or commitment to make data products freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.
• Open API is an open Application Programming Interface specification for describing, producing and consuming web services. It allows organisations to open up controlled gateways into their systems, and encourage third parties to build integrations into their own applications.  

There are some truly massive open source software projects out there that are breaking new ground and really challenging the COTS providers for functionality and benefits. In the spatial realm QGIS desktop software and PostGIS relational databases provide free and open source equivalents to COTS products.  In statistics, we make use of products like the R Project, and in software engineering you see Python, PHP, and other open source programming languages everywhere. Even on relatively closed software products, there is a trend to create open APIs so that systems can more easily integrate and exchange data.  

A nice example of QGIS and Python development is what Tom will be talking about at FOSS4G in relation to our involvement with the Northern Australian Fire Information program. The NAFI website has for several years built up an impressive array of fire related data products and services that support land managers (see our previous blogs). For the NAFI QGIS plugin, we leveraged the QGIS open source plugin framework to create a quick access tool for the folks who rely on that desktop package for fire management activities.

The NAFI QGIS plugin places a quick layers panel to the left for easy access to data layers.

We are also close to releasing another plugin that streamlines fire scar mapping tasks for Bushfires NT staff in the Northern Territory using Sentinel imagery from the European Space Agency (another free data product).

It’s not just feature parity and lower price that makes these open source products appealing—it’s also the flexibility and community-driven development opportunities they offer that allow organisations to build their own software interfaces, plug-ins, models and extensions to tailor functionality to meet real business needs.

Increasingly, government agencies publish “open data portals” like data.gov.au as an entry point to gaining easy access to FAIR data extracts and web services – by FAIR we mean data which meet principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. The Open Geospatial Consortium standardised web service formats (e.g. WMS, WMTS, WFS) these agencies publish to are a lynch pin in so many spatial systems out there. They recognise that FAIR data and open source software availability can kick start and accelerate a range of innovative products and applications they could only guess at.

If you are in a business evaluating software solutions – and I have been on both sides of that supplier-buyer fence – your decision process likely involves evaluating against a number of business risks. I would say that a well-supported open source product could have a lot to offer in terms of reducing those risks:

Other questions worth considering are: how many users are there actively using the product? How often is it updated? Do others find it easy to learn and use? What skills do you need to build on it? All the same questions you might ask of a COTS product, to be honest.  

When you make the choice to use a product like QGIS or to build your own open source solution, know that there is a whole community out there (including us!) willing to lend a helping hand. For whatever challenge you have, chances are that there is someone that has tackled something similar, and has shared a solution or developed a script or plug-in, where you can save time and potentially add value back. 

I really hope everyone heading along to the FOSS4G conference has a great time, and comes away with a basket full of ideas and new connections in their open geospatial journey. If you’d like to strike up a conversation, please feel free to contact me or hit us up on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Chris

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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

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The key reference binding these two events was the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals at the core of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals

NatureLink Perth is a relatively new initiative hosted by Murdoch Unversity that aims to provide a hub for collaboration between diverse stakeholders to integrate nature into our city, sustain our world-class biodiversity, and provide a healthy, liveable city that benefits the economy, environment and its people.

The NatureLink Perth Symposium 2019 was held on the 4 July in the Kim Beazley Lecture Theatre at Murdoch University. The Symposium provided collaborative space to discuss efforts to enable nature-sensitive urban design and nurture a biodiverse, liveable city. It was attended by a diverse set of stakeholders, with some 202 registered participants including 83 organisations, and provided many opportunities for networking and input on the key goals and challenges.

Direct engagement and input from attendees using an interactive presentation platform was an excellent and efficient method for immediately capturing audience responses and feedback for later reference and sharing. Five key issues were presented and formed the basis of the panel discussions at the core of the day (each with a lead panelist).

Planning: How can State and Local Governments work together to better integrate biodiversity and green-space into planning at all levels? (Renata Zelinova, WALGA) Fire Management: What are the conflicting elements of bushfire management and biodiversity conservation? How can we balance them to benefit both? (Tim McNaught, DFES) Community Awareness: What facilities, education and community engagement programs should we target to better connect people with nature and sustain biodiversity? (Carmen Lawrence, CCWA/UWA) Design Implementation: What are the challenges in getting approval for nature sensitive urban design and how can we improve design regulations to mainstream it? (Chris Green, UDIA) Biodiversity Audit: What are the critical information gaps in biodiversity info and how can we obtain the information needed and collect it innovatively? (Richard Hobbs, UWA)

Five NatureLink focus areas

After the extended discussion session, where some quite passionate statements from both panellists and audience about clearing for development, loss of species, habitat and expertise, and the need to integrate and liberate knowledge, attendees were asked to indicate what they considered their top three priorities. The resulting graph, from 118 individuals, is shown below – improving planning and building regulation were considered key priorities, as was increased community awareness, engagement and advocacy.

Naturelink panel discussion – top three priorities

In the afternoon session we heard from a number of the brilliant young NatureLink interns, most about to complete their studies, as well as local case studies on nature projects – Cockburn Community Wildlife Corridor (Sue Marsh), Saving Urban Turtles (Anthony Santoro, Murdoch U.), and Piney Lakes design trends (Kelly Fowler, City of Melville). The final keynote by Tom Hatton (EPA) was an inspiring call to listen to and work with the next generation, for the future. The take-home message to me was that local actions are the only real way to achieve global outcomes.

The immediate outcome of the symposium for the NatureLink team was to how to move into their collaborative phase using the information provided at the symposium. A precis of these considerations by this smaller workshop was distributed.

The following day I attended a morning session on The Circular Economy, organised by the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC) and hosted by the WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIWA). The ‘Circular Economy’ is a strategy for changing the way to produce, assemble, sell and use products to minimise waste and to reduce environmental impact, while being advantageous to business by maximising the use of valuable resources and contributing to innovation, growth and job creation. The graphic at right simply illustrates the key difference between a linear and circular economy. The keynote speaker proposed that to the ‘4 Rs’ of Return, Reuse, Repair and Recycle can be added a fifth – Re-form.

Linear vs Circular economies

The keynote speaker was Professor Veena Sahajwalla, Director of the UNSW SMaRT Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology. Veena and her team are working closely with industry partners to deliver the new science, processes and technologies that will drive the redirection of many of the world’s most challenging waste streams away from landfills and back into production; simultaneously reducing costs to alleviating pressures on the environment.

She is reimagining the global supply chain by demonstrating the viability of ‘mining’ our overburdened landfills to harness the wealth of useful elements like carbon, hydrogen and materials like silica, titania and metals embedded in our waste. One of the key elements to this vision is the implementation of smart micro-factories that can operate on a site as small as 50 square metres and can be located wherever waste may be stockpiled.

To round out this line of thought about “thinking global, acting local”, I happened to read an article the following day entitled Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option. While it looked at a range of planetary-scale technologies for ameliorating global warming, it ended with a very local solution, which made me reflect on the way nature and human technology can co-exist in the future world. Here’s one quote from the article to finish.

In fact, natural regrowth is usually better than planting, since “allowing nature to choose which species predominate during natural regeneration allows for local adaptation and higher functional diversity,” says Robin Chazdon, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut. A study published in March by 87 researchers, including Chazdon, concluded that “secondary forests recover remarkably fast” with 80 percent of their species typically back in 20 years and 100 percent in 50 years.

It looks like it could be a win-win, delivering a climate payoff on the scale of geoengineering without any of the downsides. Tim Lenton of Exeter University, a proponent of research into geoengineering, says it could be an ideal solution. “I am against introducing new forcings such as sulphate aerosol injection in the stratosphere,” he says. “But I am in favor of emulating and enhancing natural feedback loops and cycles, such as regenerating degraded forests.”

It would, he says, strengthen the biosphere’s natural forces of self-regulation that British scientist James Lovelock has termed Gaia. Lenton has a new term for what is required. Not geoengineering, but Gaia-engineering.

If you’d like to talk about how our Gaia-software-engineering can help with your environmental projects or about any of the ideas presented here, then leave a comment below, start a chat with me via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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Our little display at the event

This was genuinely a great event, and fantastic to see so many vendors and suppliers doing interesting things with open data. Perhaps just as exciting was seeing loads of people interested in what companies like us are doing in this space.

We showcased our Discovering Queensland Proof of Concept to various people, and was really good to get feedback not just on the work was performed, but ideas about how it could aggregate other data sources, and other use cases for the applications that I’d not even thought of. Was also great to bring to light what an amazing resource the Queensland State Archive’s historic photo collection is, and how as an open data resource, it can be used in new and interesting ways.

An audience that was very interested in open data 

But back to the event. The purpose of this event was threefold: to celebrate the Open Data Institute Australia Network’s (ODI) outgoing CEO Maree Adshead achievements in starting the ODI in Australia; as Brisbane’s celebration for international Open Data Day; and to showcase the great work happening in Brisbane for applications and technology utilising Open Data. And on all fronts, this was a success. Held at the Precinct, there was a strong turnout from across government and the private sector who attended, and around 10 companies showcasing software and products and use open data.

All of the exhibitors got a lot of interest from the audience afterwards

We were positioned next to Max Kelsen, who are doing some amazing work in the big data and machine learning space, and was (although this is a slightly parochial* viewpoint) wonderful to know that such an innovative team was based here in Brisbane. But across the showcases and the attendees there was an interest and commitment to Open Data and Open Source. Good times.

We’ve got some ideas in the works for the future of Discovering Queensland, but if you’d like to know more, or to get in touch with us about open data or open source in any form, contact me directly via email, or start a conversation via our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Morgan

* Editors note: Does this means we can now officially call Morgan a Queenslander?

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Back at the lab my first  job was to sort each of the pitfall traps, separating ants from other critters and debris using a microscope and a couple of dissecting needles. Considering some species were approximately the size and colour of a grain of sand, this was not always the epitome of fun. One trap had 781 individual ants in it. My supervisor, an entomologist and ant enthusiast, helped with the identification. At one point he sternly called across the lab, “Tracey… why is this ant in three pieces?”

From the data collected I was able to report on the composition of ant communities, suggest indicator species, and interpret ecological health of the sites.

Fast forward to 2015 and, like so much environmental data, this useful plethora of ant information was sitting on a hard drive doing nothing. I may be biased but I like to think all that effort should deliver more than a standalone report. I wanted the data to be available as a baseline for future studies, and the only way to do that was to make it publicly available. Ant data is particularly valuable as not only are ants a tremendous indicator species, but invertebrate data can be scarce as it generally requires experts to identify species.

I cleaned and formatted the data for upload into Gaia Resources’ Biological Data Recording System (BDRS) and created a project page in the Citizen Science Hub. As a result, not only was my data now publicly available but users could visualise it on a webmap and pull out customised shapefiles and spreadsheets.  Using QGIS, I created, among other things, a map of species richness and abundance of Iridomyrmex chasei – the genus of which is renowned for its dominance in disturbed areas thus making it a good indicator of ecological health (such as in Bisevav & Majer 1999, Hoffman & Andersen 2003, and Andersen et al. 2004).

Figure 1: Sample of abundance map for Iridomyrmex chasei.

The compulsory fields in the BDRS ensure that each data point is accompanied by a geocode, datestamp and species name, which means that the data can be shared across a wider range of groups using some of the international data standards that the BDRS supports.  In addition, my study could even be replicated – apart from those sites that are now sitting in one of the wards of Fiona Stanley Hospital! The original report can be found here as supporting documentation for anyone that loves ants so much that they would like to replicate my study in full and has a spare lifetime to identify the ant species.

This is an example of how historic, local data can be made publicly available and hence useful for biodiversity snapshots, baseline data and future comparisons. If you would like more information on the 2010 study or would like to upload data of your own, please contact me, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Tracey

REFEERENCES

Andersen, A., Fisher, A., Hoffman, B., Read, J. & Richards, R. (2004). Use of terrestrial invertebrates for biodiversity monitoring in Australian rangelands, with particular reference to ants. Austral Ecology. Blackwell Science Ltd. 29: 87-92.

Bisevav, L. & Majer, J. (1999). Comparative study of ant communities of rehabilitated mineral sands mines and heathland, Western Australia. Restoration Ecology 7(2): 117-126.

Hoffman, B. & Andersen, A. (2003). Responses of ants to disturbance in Australia, with particular reference to functional groups. Austral Ecology 28: 444-464.

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Specifically, making everything available doesn’t do anything about the quality of what you do with it.  Sometimes, notably in hackathon events, you can get some brilliant minds that normally sit outside of the ‘usual’ circles to produce some amazing results that are true and accurate reflections of the data.  But we are starting to see a lot of products out there that are displayed at inappropriate scales thereby distorting the accuracy or true intent of the data (perhaps this post all comes about from a recent re-read of “How to lie with maps“).

This looks great, but what does it actually say?

I was recently chatting away with a mate of mine and about this, and an example of that came up – one that looked at large scale interpolated data.  One particular cell (these were 1 degree of latitude and 1 degree of longitude in size) had a marked difference to the cell next door.  The person using it looked at it and went, well, it’s OK, we’re 100m inside that area with the lower value.  This showed a basic misunderstanding of the nature of this data – interpolated data, gridded up to any sort of cell, shouldn’t be used in this sort of evaluation.

This is one of the things we try to teach along the way in our QGIS training (which is specifically aimed at non-spatial professionals in the environmental industry), namely the importance of looking properly at your data, and understanding it.  This way, we’re hoping that a few of these mistakes are not repeated in the future (and if you’re interested in this, contact us at training@gaiaresources.com.au to find out more about this course, there’s one planned for November).

We’ve been also looking heavily at ways to help groups manage their spatial data, and that helps them to understand it better.  Too often we’ve seen maps produced that use data that turn out to have a doubtful provenance.  So a lot of the time in the last year, we’ve been working with groups to help them sort out and understand their data.  We’ve boiled down the essence of spatial data management to the simplest we can, and we’re implementing simple and easy to use processes to make sure that spatial data management is something that we can sort out, and then get a group to be self-sufficient in, quickly.

It’s really difficult to find a picture that says “data management”… but simple spreadsheets, folders and procedures can deliver the goods

There’s also the legacy of the ‘old ways’.  Gaia Resources started eleven years ago by looking at how to take historical legacy data from hardcopy reports into the digital age, and we’ve continued to do that over time.  We not only have been capturing data for clients (from our early days with Rio Tinto’s Environmental Characteristics and Capabilities project, to our latest work with the State Environmental Data Library for the Department of Mines and Petroleum), but also building simple systems to help them view, manage and publish their data across various sources.  This is an area that our work with groups like the Natural Resource Management (NRM) community has been very strongly focused on – our GRID product really helps facilitate this.

Finally, while data is key to a lot of things, it’s what you then also do with it – the analysis side.  There are a range of different analyses that you can start to do once the data is in order, and some of the work we’ve done in the past like the South West Australian Ecoregion Initiative, and the State Wide Dieback Framework, really show you what can be achieved when the data is available and ready to be (appropriately) analysed.  We’ve also been playing around lately with some other analysis methods and there will be a couple of follow up spatial analysis blogs in the near future from our team.

Analysing patterns and influence is just one of the things that spatial technologies can do, as we’ve done (and made widely accessible) in the Pilbara Corridors project

So, while spatial technologies no longer have the barriers to entry that they once did, there’s a lot of the industry still geared up to protecting the ‘ivory tower’ mentality.  It’s something that we don’t subscribe to here, and instead we’re looking at making spatial technologies more readily understandable, available and useful for a range of different uses – but always remembering to look at the quality.

Piers

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