Many of our blogs on open source software focus on spatial tools and the hard sciences. What we haven’t delved into recently is the importance of open source software in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). Ten years ago, Piers wrote a blog about open source collection management and it’s time for an update. Today we will focus on the growth of these solutions, our continuing support of them (and of that sector), and the open source projects we’ve been putting in place recently in GLAM organisations. 

First, to recap, open source software means that the source code is published freely – anyone can download a copy of the code, use it, and customise it. There is also the benefit of reduced ongoing costs – rather than continuing to pay annual licensing fees, open source software installations require only hosting, and upgrades to the code. In addition to financial sustainability, open source software provides technical sustainability. Because the code is freely available, it means that the community of users can contribute bug fixes and improvements in an ongoing fashion. Realising that many GLAM organisations don’t have specialised IT departments, implementation of the software and upgrades is where Gaia Resources can assist, and we have various levels of support that can be tailored to an institution’s needs. 

Open source software also supports the evidential value and provenance of your records – the source code is freely available and can be audited to ensure that your data is not being changed or manipulated by the system. Open source software provides a level of transparency for institutions that need to be able to attest that their collections are untampered with. 

When working with a collecting organisation, we usually recommend one of three open source tools; Access to Memory (AtoM), CollectiveAccess, or ArchivesSpace. The solutions we provide can be out of the box – that is, it is installed as “vanilla versions” without customisation – or in some cases, they can be heavily customised such as with our Queensland State Archives implementation of ArchivesSpace. We have particular experience in implementing the Australian Series System for archives in all of these software packages. 

Access to Memory is an open source tool that is developed and maintained by Artefactual (one of our partners in the current Digital Preservation project for Queensland State Archives). Artefactual also develops and maintains Archivematica – a tool for Digital Preservation. AtoM, as it is known colloquially, is a great tool for small to medium size archives. It provides not only an easy to use interface for staff, but offers an immediate web presence that allows public access to search the collections. For many of our customers, we have implemented add-ons or plugins to provide customised functionality, ranging from subscriber-only access to digital materials to online ordering. 

CollectiveAccess is another popular open source collection management tool. Its flexibility is a key benefit of the software, and it can be implemented to manage collections of museum objects (including all SPECTRUM functions), archival records, and digital materials. We have implemented CollectiveAccess for several clients from across the GLAM sector, from archives to high-end art collections, and even not for profits managing their own historical collections. Whirl-i-gig, out of the United States, maintains the source code for CollectiveAccess, and our own Gaia Resources developers have contributed bug fixes and added new features to the source code as we make improvements for our clients. 

ArchivesSpace is the tool that we have implemented at the greatest scale. Queensland State Archives uses a highly customised version of ArchivesSpace to manage their 64 kilometres of government records. While ArchivesSpace does come with a public interface, our work with QSA included a custom-built public interface, ArchivesSearch, and we have also implemented these systems for clients in Tasmania. Lyrasis, again in the United States, maintains ArchivesSpace core code.      

With our experience over the last fifteen years, we understand the needs of collecting organisations and can recommend solutions that fit the needs and scale of the client. We stand by our passion for open source software solutions and advocate for them as the most sustainable solution for collecting institutions. Whether your organisation is small and volunteer-run or you have kilometres of records, one of the above systems can be implemented in a way to suit your needs. 

Think we can help assess or even customise the best tool for your organisation? Get in touch with us via email or start a conversation with us on one of our social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Sarah

The post Open Source Solutions in the Museum and Archive Worlds appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Over the past several years, Gaia Resources has grown its team considerably due to an increase in demand for our services. However, there are still plenty of occasions where we acknowledge that a specific project or undertaking requires additional resources or skills, beyond what our own team delivers. Sometimes this is in an opportunity to move into an entirely new area (when we partnered with the Global Wetlands project for a fish identification solution using AI), or in delivery of a specialised solution that we want to ensure we bring all of the best knowledge and skills to the area (such as the consortium of organisations we have brought together for the delivery of the Queensland State Archives Digital Preservation project.)

Sometimes it is because our values align so well with a partner it is almost like considering them an extension of the team.

This is the case with our partners in the digital experience agency, Liquid Interactive. We have worked so well with them, and so often that we will not only consider them for projects that we know will utilise their skills and specialisations, our own team is excited for each opportunity to work alongside them.

We have worked with them as sub-contractors to deliver development support for Drupal websites in GovCMS; they have assisted us on projects where providing data delivery with a great user experience was key; when one of our team members relocated to a city without any other Gaia Resources staff, we set up her office to be colocated with Liquid Interactive team members. I have also been fairly regularly featuring their Future Led Series of events in my own blogs, and while the events themselves have been a fantastic opportunity to hear informed and varied opinions on topics that matter to our future – I also have to confess to enjoying an opportunity to get to know their team a little better.

Liquid Interactive themselves was first introduced to us through one of our previous employees, Morgan Strong, who has engaged them successfully in previous roles. Morgan has moved on to a role as the Digital Transformation Manager at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), but is also still heavily involved in our organisation as a Drupal and Open Source advocate, and as a client in delivering Collection-based projects.

The world is ever-changing, but I believe there are some things that remain the same. One of these is that as much as what we deliver is important, how we do it is also impactful. It is through our connections with other people that we come to understand the world, so building positive connections can only help us to find our place to deliver the most to our community.

If you are interested in working with an organisation that is collaborative, people-focused, and provides a supportive culture for teamwork, reach out to us via email at info@gaiaresouces.com.au or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sophie

The post Partnerships, people and change appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers!
Tracey

Sponsors

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

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

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

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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Forest ecosystems play an essential role in the environment. Monitoring and detecting change in forests is important for the development of conservation policies that would lead to sustainable forest management. For this purpose, Earth Observation (EO) data can be analysed in order to assess disturbances in forest vegetation, as it can reach a worldwide coverage with a high temporal frequency at a low cost. Currently, remote sensing techniques are being used to process EO data from passive and active sensors, providing fast and accurate results across a wide range of applications.

The idea for our particular study was to look at Sentinel-2 (optical) and Sentinel-1 (Side Aperature Radar, or SAR) inputs into a processing model that outputs a regional NDVI raster coverage. The Sentinel imagery captures an image every 5 days for a given patch of the world, and so the potential was there to look at a long term monitoring and change detection tool. We needed to assess the imagery products to see if they could give us useful and consistent output, and groundtruth that against known areas of change on the ground. We also needed to know what technology was out there to help us in this challenge, and what others (researchers and private organisations) had done to solve similar challenges.

The Sentinel-2 platform (left) from the European Space Agency provides coverage every 5 days that can be used for forest canopy cover applications.

We started with a literature review to uncover research that had been conducted on the use of Sentinel and Landsat imagery on forest cover change, both in that south-eastern parts of Australia, nationally and overseas. This step also included looking at current ground forest canopy assessment techniques. With the short term nature of our investigation, we had to really target and timebox our search, and we were able to find some really good material from reasearch at universities across Australia and major research organisations. The Veg Machine project and the previous work done by its originators Jeremy Wallace and Bob Karfs at CSIRO on long-term monitoring using Landsat coverage was an inspiration for our modelling approach. As were the personal experiences of our team members from previous projects and roles.

The literature review had another more software focused aspect to it, as we were looking at a number of analytics platforms that would be the processing backbone and visualisation tool for our modelling.  From this we decided to pick up some Jupyter Notebook scripts in Geoscience Australia’s Digital Earth Australia (DEA) platform, and leverage the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. The DEA product enabled generating outputs for a regional scale view, and the GEE platform enabled users to produce NDVI plots on demand for a given local area. The two platforms complemented eachother by providing that regional overview and target area time series plots.

The Digital Earth Australia (DEA) platform and Jupyter Notebook scripts configured for the regional comparison of NDVI images against a long-term baseline.  

The Google Earth platform enables users to look at time series plots of NDVI for an area of interest.

We devised a modelling approach that would ingest new Sentinel imagery inputs and compare them against a 3 year rolling NDVI baseline. If the new image contained pixels above or below our thresholds, then it would simply show up as a different colour on the mapping: green for significant positive change, red for significant negative change. In this proof-of-concept investigation, the client was happy to look at simply detecting a change of significance; and the reason for that change was something they could target and follow-up on. That reason could be anything from heat stress, planned/unplanned, land clearing, fire activity or disease. We also considered seasonal differences and frequency of images for processing within that modelling approach.

Finally, operational staff at the client’s offices use ArcGIS and QGIS software for a range of mapping and analysis tasks. The final raster outputs from the DEA and GEE platforms are capable of being visualised and analysed further in GIS packages along with other key operational and administrative layers.

GIS software can visualise the raster outputs from the modelling for further analysis and decision support.

So as a first step proof-of-concept investigation, we were able to document a technical and operational approach for our client to detect forest cover canopy change and support their bushfire risk decisions. The next stage coming up will be all about implementation and scaling a solution on AWS cloud infrastructure.

We’d love to hear from you if you have been involved in using any of the tools or applications mentioned here, or you’d just like to have a chat out of interest. Feel free to contact me or hit us up on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Chris

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I had that opportunity recently when our partners at Outline Global (who capture high resolution aerial imagery for the Northern Territory Government) called me up and asked if I could wander around the Darwin region looking for Ground Control Points (GCPs) that had been surveyed in 2019, and give them a bit of a zhuzh… a bit of a refresh…  a lick of new paint… a new lease on life as it were.

I jumped at the chance to get outside and do some ‘field work.’ Ok, it’s a far cry from my days as a geologist stepping off helicopters onto remote mountain ridges… but hey when you spend the majority of your time tapping a keyboard and clicking a mouse, this is an opportunity with a lot of advantages. Firstly, there’s a lot of the Darwin region I had not seen. Then there’s the sunshine and beautiful conditions of the Dry season, the chance to use some free tracking apps… it was a bit like an easy but widely distributed Geocaching excursion.

What are GCPs I hear you ask? These are temporary survey markers that are obvious control points visible from a plane capturing aerial imagery. The plane criss-crosses on a structured flight plan, so that the resulting imagery strips have significant overlap and can be used for post-processing. Analysts use software to find the GCPs in overlapping images to ‘register’ the imagery and create an orthorectified mosaic. To go through this process with a high level of accuracy you either need to re-use old GCPs with known surveyed coordinates, or conduct a new survey.

You see, these dilapidated white markers were in need of some TLC. Some were little more than a bunch of painted white rocks assembled in a cross and referenced in the previous survey report, and it is not surprising that in the parks and public places they were placed two years back, that someone thought: ‘Well, that is a collection of rocks that is just begging to be kicked.’

An example of a GCP located out at Lee Point. On arrival the marker and cross (left) were barely recognisable. The refreshed GCP (right) will now be visible from the aerial imagery. (right)

To be fair, it is not surprising in that time that these mysterious assemblages would have experienced both human and natural wear and tear, such as blustering winds, monsoonal rains, people with anarchistic tendencies.

So here I come smiling away with my set of 23 waypoints loaded up onto an free and open-source app called OpenGPXTracker and a can of white spray paint. I also brought my laptop along for the ride with a QGIS project with the waypoints and OpenStreetMaps. This was my regional view to help me plan my route,  but I also had the original survey report on the laptop as a reference. I also made sure to bring along plenty of water and a first aid kit.

Across two days, I navigated to the coordinate positions, and followed a bit of a process at each destination:

• wander around with my phone until I stood on the waypoint location
• locate the white GCP marker (sometimes very obvious, other times pretty damn difficult)
• take a “before” photograph
• brush off the soil vegetation
• spray paint the original area
• take an “after” photograph and notes
• hop back in the vehicle

As the tracklog map below hints at, there was a fair bit driving, a number of little dead-ends where the map was a bit ambitious about what constituted a road. There was one that turned out to be a 10km bush track along a fenceline that connected two sealed country roads. Initially happy to find the short-cut, I was soon glad to have brought the 4WD so I could avoid getting bogged in the sandy ruts on that track.

It’s a dragon! Ground Control Points and routes travelled across the Darwin and Humpty Doo region. Day 1 (blue) and day 2 (orange) are shown.

I got to see parts of Darwin you don’t often drive to unless you have a work responsibility to be there, or are a keen fisherman. Apart from the mundane manhole cover on the side of the road, there were termite mounds and historical sites. For instance, Channel Island was a bit of a drive but was an interesting spot with its power station, jetty and historical uses as a quarantine hospital and leprosarium dating back to the early 1900’s. The GCP there by the way was a damaged sign that I think someone must have backed into with their boat!

Channel Island Bridge looking back at jetty and transmission towers (left), Ground Control Point at Channel Island (right),

So now you are up to speed with my field work out of the Darwin office of Gaia Resources! Hope you found that somewhat amusing, but if you’d like to learn more about the imagery being captured, or other projects we get involved in the Top End please feel free to contact me or start up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post Spicing up work life with a bit of field work 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.

The 2019 Territory NRM Conference featured a number of presentations like this one in the Darwin Convention Centre and the nearby CDU Waterfront campus (Source: Territory NRM)

In this year’s conference, the NAFI team will facilitate a workshop to look at recent developments in some of the important tools that land managers depend on for monitoring fires across 70% of Australia. The workshop will be demonstrating some of the latest tools leveraging NAFI for accessing and analysing fire information for NRM support. Part of that will be on their new Plugin for our favourite QGIS software (which we have blogged about previously), and our current project to develop a NAFI mobile app for Android and iOS devices. Also on the agenda will be the latest developments in providing sophisticated fire history analysis information through the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Metrics (SMERF) interface.

The NAFI QGIS plugin was released earlier this year, providing an easy to use interface to access fire information data products.

Those attending will get to see a preview of our “test” app development to date, and we’ll have a few devices on hand so they can play with a test version. We’ll talk about the future vision and invite participants to provide feedback on how they see the app being used in the field. These sorts of sessions are gold for us in the development space, because we can really get a sense of where the high value functionality lies. Obviously the true power behind the app is the NAFI data products, but we are really excited about  what this means for those who use them. So as not to give everything away, we’ll blog after the event to provide a recap.

So if you are heading along to the Territory NRM conference, tap elbows with Chris and feel free to strike up a conversation. Or get in touch online through on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

The post Preview of the Territory NRM Conference 2020 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The internal Archival Management System (ArchivesSpace) went live at the end of June, along with a new public interface for searching the archives (ArchivesSearch), and a new system to support Queensland agencies (ArchivesGateway).  Now that the systems are delivered, we’ve even delivered several additional releases under the ongoing support model, which has seen us improve the systems already.

The project has been a transformative one for QSA, moving them from their previous Archives One system into the open-source system ArchivesSpace, plus the new ArchivesSearch and ArchivesGateway.  Along the way, they have been working with our consortium on reviewing their business practices and making sure that the system is fit for purpose.  It’s been fantastic to have the QSA staff (and the DAP team) engaged so strongly in an Agile project, which has meant we can realise many different benefits along the way by pivoting where needed.  Combining that Agile approach with a good preparatory phase and a good delivery phase at each end has seen this combined Waterfall/Agile approach work really well.

We have also delivered the project to the agreed budget and timeframe.  This in itself has been a major win for us, our consortium, and for the client as well.  This was only possible by working on a project of this scale in a very open, honest and highly collaborative way with the team at QSA and the DAP team specifically – I am certain that without this the project would not have been delivered on time and budget.

Lessons learned from this project were many and varied, and they range from tiny little ones to major ones – all part of the wonderful experience of a truly collaborative approach with the client where really, it felt like we were all pulling towards the end goal of the delivered systems instead of that sometimes fraught “customer-supplier” relationship that can happen in consulting.  Following on from an upcoming publication from QSA themselves, we will also be publishing a “reflection piece” on our blog about the project, covering these lessons.

It’s been a massive project, and I am standing on the shoulders of many people who put in a lot of work on this project, right across the project teams.  There are numerous “thank you” messages to people right across this project, from our team at Gaia Resources (including those who have since left) who worked long hours when needed, to our consortium partners who continue to assist and work with us on other projects, to our clients in both the DAP and QSA teams, who worked with us in the most collaborative, open, honest and constructive manner from the very first days of the project.

On a very personal note, I have to also thank the State of Queensland – who put their faith into three small businesses and has allowed us to establish Gaia Resources in Queensland, generate a number of jobs for the State, and to provide a solid base from which we can continue to develop our business and deliver on our mission at Gaia Resources – to make the world a better place.  Making archives available to the public in a rich way helps to make the information on our past available – and gives us an opportunity to learn from the past and improve into the future.

We look forward to working further with the QSA, supporting their systems, and working with them on other initiatives such as Q-Album (read more about that in Sarah’s last blog). Through our work, we are proud to support them in their mission and to help them achieve their vision, “To inspire all Queenslanders to discover the stories contained within the record of the Queensland Government – anytime, anywhere.”

We’re really proud to see our work contribute to this vision and we’d love to talk more about it with you if you are interested – please don’t hesitate to drop me a line personally, or give me a call on 0411 754 006.

Piers

The post Transforming Queensland State Archives appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Lately, we’ve been working through the tendering and procurement process for a new collections project in Tasmania, and since we’ve now received a signed contract we’re able to talk about this one (broadly, at this early stage). We’re implementing new Collection Management Systems for a range of institutions in Tasmania, which will not only assist Libraries Tasmania, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, University of Tasmania and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, but will also help make these collections available for much broader use by larger audiences.

In the current circumstances around the COVID-19 pandemic, with closed borders in Australia having significant impacts on travel, projects like this one can not only help to make information available to those who can’t travel, but also be a draw-card for tourism post-pandemic – people wanting to see particular objects, especially those that are highly iconic.  I have fond memories of visiting Tasmanian museums when I was a representative on some national workgroups, and seeing the amazing objects that are held in those collections first hand.  As a direct result, at the first opportunity I had, my wife and I went back to Tassie for a holiday, touring the collections in Hobart, Launceston and a whole raft of places including the amazing natural locations that Tasmania is also famous for (see below).

Admittedly it’s no collection organisation, but the memories of touring Tasmania remain strong five years later thanks to scenery like this.

This project will have a strong focus on open-source software, which is something of a specialty of ours at Gaia Resources.  Open-source software in the broader collections community – also known as the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) community – has been getting a lot of traction.  We’ve been implementing and supporting systems based on CollectiveAccess, ArchivesSpace, AccesstoMemory, Archivematica and the first two of these will be involved in the Tasmanian project as key parts of the delivery.

The project is just commencing, and we will be blogging about the approaches that we will take in the project and the work that we’re undertaking in more detail, but it’s great to work with another series of collections to make them available to a wider audience.  And just maybe, I can go back and revisit some of those memorable places when this pandemic is over.

Stay tuned for more, or drop us a line via email, or via our social media channels: Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Piers

The post Managing Tasmania appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The sunset over Darwin. 

After experiencing another dry and extreme fire season in 2019, the Forum was an important gathering of fire practitioners, park managers, policy-makers, ecologists, researchers and carbon industry experts to share knowledge to improve our understanding and practice of savanna fire management. To an outsider – like myself last year – it may seem a bit counter-intuitive that we would consider lighting fires to reduce our carbon footprint; but on a regional scale across two States and a Territory that is precisely what is happening in a deliberate carbon abatement and land management effort. Through careful planning and application of the on-ground knowledge of traditional owners, the controlled burning of savanna grasslands in the early dry season (typically April – June) greatly reduces the more severe late dry season bushfires that are so destructive to whole landscapes and ecosystems. The less burning, of course, means less carbon is emitted into our atmosphere.

The Forum kicked off with Bilawara Lee of the local Larrakia people giving over 320 delegates a warm Welcome to Country, followed by a keynote address from Luke Gosling (MP for Solomon). From there the scene was set with a summary of the 2019 fire weather from the Bureau of Meteorology where we heard about the fluctuations in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole – a strangely fascinating interaction I won’t go into here but if you are interested BoM provide a monthly Climate Model Summary to describe how these two factors influence weather patterns across Australia. In particular, they help explain why we’ve had much drier conditions in the last two years.

Rohan Fisher from the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research then presented some great time-series of the burning patterns across WA, the NT and Queensland and stressed how “engagement with traditional knowledge and science in a very honest, open and respectful way… has resulted in the decrease in fire.” The screenshot below is an example where you can see the substantial month-by-month differences between 2019 and 2004 when similar climatic conditions prevailed but the fire management practices of recent times were not being coordinated. It is pretty telling that 44,800 square kilometres (or 4.48 million hectares) more area burned in 2004, and most of it in the late Dry months. By the way, SBS and other media outlets picked up on this good news story with interviews of Willie Rioli and Rohan, and the full set of NAFI animations and graphics produced for the Forum can be found here.

Late dry season burns in 2004 and 2019 across the north of Australia (snapshot of NAFI animation). Burning for the two years is shown by month on a histogram view (left) and corresponding map view (right).

There were some really interesting talks over the two days from ranger groups enlightening us with their experience and success stories on country, economic analysts considering the price of carbon and how to assess co-benefits, and scientists looking at biodiversity research and the relationship between fire management and ecosystem health. It was a dizzying array of topics that looked at important considerations for the industry, with something for everyone involved. A few highlights for me were the breakout session for fire ecology and biodiversity, where for example the Australian Wildlife Conservancy gave us a case study about the impact of fire on the fragile habitat of the purple crowned fairywren. 

The Department of Environment Natural Resources presented their research on native mammal population declines in different landscape types across the Northern Territory. In the plenary discussion of fire management on the world stage, we learned about the world-leading fire management practices in Australia compared to other savanna regions, and differences between Australia’s carbon abatement framework and other country’s carbon trading markets. Videos presentations are often a fun change-up, and I think everyone enjoyed the Lion King soundtrack that accompanied a video about the knowledge sharing expedition to Botswana – where indigenous rangers passed on knowledge of fire weather, ignition and management principles were passed on to local authorities there.

I’ve found the Forum to be a great way to network and meet people from a range of professions, and to get a perspective on the challenging activities these people get involved in – from not-for-profit organisations like the World Wildlife Fund to for-profit carbon project consultancies and public servants.

Enjoying a sunset drink and a catch-up at the Forum networking event with Ellie Boyle and Leigh-Ann Woolley from the World Wildlife Fund.

After chatting to a few people about small mammal recovery and ecosystem recovery, one of the things I spent some time looking into was how QGIS, Saga  and integrated field data collection solutions like QField or Fulcrum could play an important role in  planning and evaluation of carbon abatement projects. In fact, as part of the Forum we ran two QGIS training courses on the Thursday and Friday, so I was keen to see how that free and open source product could help industry practitioners beyond the basic production of maps.

On that topic, it was Susanne Casanova (Territory NRM) and others like Ben Corey (Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions) who got me thinking about how the industry needs to consider other fire metrics beyond the early vs late dry season burnt area statistics, and consider things like fragmentation (or distance between remnant vegetation patches) in measuring the success of a burning program. As far as I can ascertain, early Dry Season burning and its lower intensity fires generally result in more patchy landscapes with greater opportunity for small native mammals to recover. [Note: I would love to learn more from the experts in this field, and understand there are many factors that influence fire behaviour].  These small bits of remaining habitat are important pieces in the biodiversity puzzle as they provide refuge from predators and feral animals as well as food sources. An analysis could be looking at fragmentation and these distance measures in relation to the range distance of a particular endangered species (or collection of species). The resulting data can be an important measure for both planning burning regimes and after to understand how effective the approach has been. QGIS landscape ecology plug-ins together with Sentinel-2 (or higher resolution imagery) look like they provide some great potential for adding value here.

Tracey will give a recap of the QGIS training we have been running lately, but as the first run of it in Darwin I think it was a great success. We had nine attendees for these two one-day courses with representation from the Northern Territory Government, pastoral groups, NRM fire managers and environmental consultancies. Great facilities at the centrally located Darwin Innovation Hub which we will use again, and from all accounts everyone really learned a lot about how to start using this powerful software in their own environmental activities. From the feedback Tracey and I received, we know people wanted another day or an intermediate session, so I will be looking at ways to make that happen and to continue building capacity in the north.

If any of this recap has piqued your interest, or you want to talk about your own adventures in fire management or use of spatial tools like QGIS, please feel free to start a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or e-mail me directly on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au

Chris

The post Savanna Fire Forum Review appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Summer of QGIS Training online appeared first on Gaia Resources.