Image source

Last year we were contacted by the Shire of Mundaring to design wildlife corridors in their local government area. The purpose was to maintain a healthy landscape, restoring connectivity and promoting local biodiversity through the expansion of available habitats. As a solution, we conducted a spatial analysis using QGIS to derive the optimum paths to establish connectivity between vegetation patches, considering a few datasets of a sufficiently high level resolution.

It is interesting to see how there are many toolboxes developed to design wildlife corridors using licensed GIS software, but not many of them are available to add in open source software. There are a few models that can be downloaded as standalone software, which aim to find optimum restorations paths or connect reserves. The problem with these is that they can be out of date (you can encounter many bugs while trying to get your results) or the parameters you can control are very limited, so there is little room for tailoring the corridors to your preference. 

Open-source software tools and plugins are often developed for a specific purpose and then put out to the public domain ‘as-is’ for others to adapt. For these niche applications, that might be as far as they get, and when you want to use them you are either limited to those application constraints or faced with a development cost to adjust the tool to your needs. There seems to be an opportunity here actually, to adapt open-source tools in QGIS and other software, and offer a solution that is tailored to defining wildlife corridor options. So I am looking into that as part of my professional development at Gaia Resources, and should have some news around this in the not-to-distant future!

The Least-Cost Path is one of the many plugins that can be added to QGIS. This kind of multi-criteria analysis is very popular for designing corridors for a range of applications like wildlife conservation and infrastructure planning.

The concept behind performing a Least Cost Path analysis is the following: given an origin and a destination point, the algorithm will search in a cost raster for the cells with the minimum value and create a corridor between them. 

If you are not familiar with GIS jargon, you might be wondering what a cost raster is. Long story short, the cost raster represents the potential resistance faced while transiting that path, and it combines a number of parameters that we’ll look into in a bit more detail below. Basically, each cell in your cost raster is the aggregation of scores that you apply to the input parameters. 

Image source

Let’s think of all the parameters that need to be considered while designing corridors, with the idea that each of these can be sourced as data inputs into the cost raster. First and foremost: vegetation, an essential component that provides habitat and shelter for biodiversity. Next, we want to provide some source of water for the wildlife, so this element should also be included. 

Knowing the land use types is also important while planning this kind of development, since some of them will be better to restore vegetation than others (I do not want to think of bandicoots establishing their home near a highway!). Talking about roads, that is another key dataset, since it would be ideal to avoid them (although crossing them is also possible, like in this example). Other datasets can be considered in this kind of study as well, it all depends on the requirements you want to cover with your corridors.

These parameters are given scores according to different criteria, considering how suitable they are for conservation purposes – and the scores are applied to the input datasets. For example, a criteria could be ‘main roads should be a severe impediment to wildlife corridor crossings, and wildlife corridors should not be present within 10m of a main road’. When the criteria are defined they will be assigned different scores according to a ranking, i.e. highways will have a higher cost than a minor road. Once the datasets are ready, they can be merged, and the scores will be added to each other; the final merged layer represents the cost raster that serves as input in the Least Cost Path plugin.

The model will create a corridor connecting one source point to a destination, or many corridors from a source to various points. A distinct advantage of using the Least Cost Path algorithm is that it is data-driven; it selects paths through analysis of inputs with defined rules that would otherwise be subjective and counter intuitive to choose while doing a visual analysis of the area. The idea is that the paths chosen by the tool will have a lower overall cost based on the data inputs. 

Data-driven models will often lead to some unexpected results, and a review of the results can highlight additional perspectives, missed criteria, opportunities for improvement or data inputs that can be better handled. This makes wildlife corridor mapping an iterative process, but the model itself is robust and, once established, can be repeated with ease. For example, you can incorporate particular strategic planning areas not represented in the land use dataset you used in the last run of the model, or introduce firebreaks and ideal spots for wildlife cross-overs to overcome barriers on main roads.

The corridors obtained from the model can be given different priorities, as they will have an assigned cost as a result of crossing through different areas. Since the corridors have diverse lengths, a good practice is to obtain the cost/length ratio. This helps organisations to decide – alongside environmental and planning objectives – where the best value is for their revegetation and investment.

We can all help protect biodiversity by managing the environment in local areas. Organisations can use wildlife corridors to make meaningful engagement with landowners and feed into the planning process – giving everyone a chance to contribute to the local biodiversity in their area. If this project sounded interesting to you and would like to do something similar, reach out and start a conversation with us via email, or through our social media platforms –  Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Rocio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers!
Tracey

Sponsors

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

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

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

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

The post Open source software and open data appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The course will be held over two days – 18 and 19th November at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via training@gaiaresources.com.au or call us on 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

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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.

The local Larrakia people actually observe 6 seasons (November and December is “Balnba” or Rainy Season), and in many respects I think that is more appropriate than the two “Wet” and “Dry” because there are significant changes between the Big Wind Time, the Build Up, the Rainy Season and the Monsoon Season.

The Gulumoerrgin Season calendar has six overlapping seasons and characteristics (Source: CSIRO and contributors Lorraine Williams, Judith Williams, Maureen Ogden, Keith Risk and Anne Risk)

I’m pretty sure I was already sweating the moment I got out of my car en-route to a Territory NRM conference workshop at the Charles Darwin University Waterfront Campus at 7:30am, but I’m mostly used to it now. “It’s a thing” as my colleague Tony likes to say, and it is only temporary. At this time of year the sun is hot, and clouds start to gather in the afternoon while the humidity rises, and on rare late afternoons the sweet relief of rain buckets down for an hour or so to cool us all down.

That day though was one of those hide-from-the-sun-like-a-vampire sort of days (fine if you stay in the shadows) – and silly me I was wearing pants on this particular day. Unlike the park rangers, land managers and researchers gathered at the conference who do a lot of work out in the field conducting savanna burning programs, protecting rock art and preserving biodiversity – I tend to sit in an air conditioned office most of the time tapping away at the computer and really can’t hold a candle to the important work these people do.

What we are trying to do though, is help by increasing the accessibility and power of data to aid in their planning and decision making. So at this workshop I was helping to demonstrate the new tools and technology being leveraged by the the North Australia and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) service. The NAFI team have been busy development of new tools, the SMERF dashboard and enhanced services on their website. Our part in this has been to develop a plugin for QGIS that increases the accessibility of the NAFI data products on that free and open-source GIS platform, and a mobile app for Android and iOS that provides near real-time fire mapping in the field.

Peter Jacklyn shows workshop attendees around the features of the NAFI website.

Participants at the workshop got to see a sneak peek of the app that is still in development, including the live fire hotspots and firescars against a backdrop of 3 base map options. We got some valuable feedback from Kakadu Park Rangers and others about how the app would be useful and what would make it even better in the next version. So there was real excitement about the ability to download imagery and topo maps for offline use, and the way in which the app automatically updates hotspots and firescars while you are online (and have the app active). The directional GPS position was also really important for field crew, and they showed us how they are currently producing static PDF maps and sending them out with field crews. One of the most interesting insights was to hear that rangers are able to receive a decent 3G/4G signal while in the air above a remote area – so theoretically our app could be updating information while in the air to be used offline back on the ground. We got some other really good ideas out of the interactions at the workshop, and so I am looking forward to continuing to work with the NAFI team.

I also attended one day of the conference itself, and went along to the Gala Dinner to see the deserving recipients of Territory NRM awards. There were some pretty interesting talks – including research findings from Bretty Murphy (Charles Darwin Uni – RIEL) about the shocking impact of two amplifying issues, of fire and feral cats, facing small threatened mammals in the Top End. The one that captured everyone’s heart though, was from school kids at the Manyalluk School and their teacher Ben Kleinig. Ben’s initiative to seek and use STEM funding for educational applications with a drone and motion sensor cameras – and these indigenous childrens’ enthusiasm – was truly inspiring. Here’s the description from the Territory NRM conference program:

“Students from Manyallaluk School are passionate about their country and through STEM subjects are gaining skills to fly drones; record, graph and analyse data; present findings; set-up of trail cameras and camera traps; and to use a snake camera. Key topics are buffalo and their impact on the environment, how plastic waste can harm turtles, different habitats for different species, and surveying species with a focus on comparing feral to native animal numbers. Students have been empowered to think about interesting careers that utilise technology in the environment, including land management, and plans for the future include a partnership with TNRM to build a feral animal exclusion zone to study and survey, using DNA testing to locate and map Gouldian finches and other species, ongoing surveying of wildlife in different habitats, and the ongoing challenge of photographing the elusive echidna.”

They have their own Youtube channel (with videos like the one we saw below), and I smile every time I think about the kids in lab coats showing their charts and saying “Let’s see what the data tells us.” As someone who gets passionate about data and data science, it is really uplifting to see technology, data and environmental issues being tackled by young regional students. Not surprisingly they won the Next Generation NRM Award.

So another great year for NRM in the Territory, and a fantastic job by the Territory NRM organisation in bringing us all together. If anyone wants to find out more about our collaboration with the NAFI team, or to chat about ways in which we can help with your NRM projects please feel free to start up a conversation on our regular channels on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

The post Recap on the Territory NRM conference 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.

A video introduction to the new NAFI fire mapping QGIS plug-in.

The new NAFI fire mapping QGIS plug-in with side panel for quick search and upload of fire scar and hotspot layers.

QGIS is a free and open-source software product for mapping and analysis, and this new plug-in is one part of a bigger project we are currently delivering between Tom Lynch and myself in Darwin, and our team in Perth. Funded by the Commonwealth government and Charles Darwin University, the project aims to broaden the uptake of fire mapping data to indigenous rangers, conservation and environmental scientists and carbon industry managers. As Rohan describes in his article in The Conversation (link), the tropical savannas of northern Australia are among the most fire-prone regions in the world, and fire management systems in use – led in large part by Indigenous land managers – is world-leading.

“The NAFI Plugin will provide an important additional resource to support fire managers across northern Australia and the Rangelands. The service provides critical near real-time information on active fire as well as regular updates [to] burnt area mapping. This supports strategic fire management planning and response for thousands of fire managers across Australia. The addition of the NAFI plugin will provide an opportunity for more sophisticated planning with NAFI data and a portal for building GIS capacity amongst land managers already using NAFI. NAFI is already the most used Land and fire information portal for across most of Australia. The Plugin will provide additional access and promotion of this important service.”
— Rohan Fisher

Relatively safe ‘cool’ burns can create firebreaks. (source: DCBR)

Basically, this plugin is free and available in the QGIS software platform (also free!). People now have greater accessibility to the web mapping services that are already available on the NAFI website, with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web map services, common base maps and data downloads now just a click away.

The fire activity mapping is based on information from satellites, such as hotspots (locations of recently burning fires) and fire scars (maps of recently burnt country). Hotspots are sourced from Landgate Western Australia (from NOAA and NASA satellites) and Geoscience Australia (from NASA satellites). Fire scars are sourced via NAFI and produced by the Darwin Center for Bushfires Research (Charles Darwin University). The coverage of the NAFI data products actually includes a large proportion of Australia including the vast desert and Rangelands regions.

Coverage of NAFI fire mapping covers 70% of Australia (source: NAFI website)

We are really excited about this new addition to the NAFI infrastructure, and are looking forward to hearing the feedback from bushfire and carbon industry experts on how it will benefit their planning and operations.

If you want to know more about this topic, or you want to talk about your own adventures in fire management and GIS software, 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 Fire mapping QGIS plugin appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Much earlier on, YMAC had taken up a ‘data discovery and map production plug-in’ and customised it for their own environment. The tool provided an easy-to-use and time-saving interface for staff to find the mapping layers they wanted such as Statewide imagery, aboriginal sites and internal layers. It also had an excellent map production tool that automated the creation of standard YMAC-branded map outputs at various page sizes and orientations.  The change in the back-end development framework to Python 3, QT 5 and other software library upgrades meant that all those handy plug-ins we use no longer worked in QGIS 3.x versions (further info for the techies can be found on the QGIS API Documentation).

The YMAC QGIS tool (left menu bar and pop-up interface) provides a range of data loading and map configuration options. Automated map layouts (right) reflect company branding and auto map elements.

So YMAC engaged us to upgrade their tool – and my colleague Tom Lynch and I were keen to get started.

Looking back on the project, it reminds me a bit of my father’s obsession with restoring classic cars. He has a great mind for solving mechanical challenges – while playing classic blues-rock in the garage late into the night – and could see the inherent value of transforming broken-down vehicles like a ’53 Ford Truck he dubbed ‘Snoopy’ to its former glory.

My father’s prized possession – his restored 1953 Ford Truck.

For him it was as much about getting the thing running again as it was about the visual restoration, and that required a fair amount of tinkering and elbow grease.  I could never get into that hands-on mechanical work (my father found that immensely frustrating) but hey, I could still admire the perseverance and the outcomes he achieved in making these things roadworthy some 50 years after they were made.

Even though the YMAC tool upgrade was a relatively small project by comparison (and to do with software rather than gears and fan belts!), Tom and I discovered the changes ‘under the hood’ were significant. After gaining an understanding of the workflows and components to retain, it was a lot of work and testing to update the code references and verify everything worked as expected. In some cases, entire QGIS component libraries had been overhauled with new ways of creating map elements like legends and layout elements. Development took longer than expected and testing was an interesting process. With all of the work happening remotely and involving iterative test versions, the team at YMAC were very obliging in providing test data and remote connections so we could spot and iron out unexpected behaviour and glitches along the way.

In the end, we are really proud of the result and happy to see that the YMAC team have rolled out the new tool along with QGIS 3 across their business. It is a piece in the puzzle for us as consultants to help organisations like YMAC to achieve greater operational efficiencies and pursue their objective to “continue to walk together with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”

“Well done to you both for getting YMAC tools 3 over the line! It’s been a long journey however both Marty and myself are really appreciative of your efforts and professionalism. We’re really excited that we can roll out the new version to all our staff!”
– Will Davis, YMAC GIS Coordinator.

If you’d want to know more about QGIS, our work in this space, have a look at our QGIS training pages, or please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

The post Plugging into data and map automation in QGIS 3 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Not unexpectedly, we’ve had a rise in the number of people asking us for our freely available online QGIS training materials (currently for version 2.18, which is pretty old now – but the course is getting a makeover for version 3.10 soon).  So we did a little digging on who’s using our course now — there’s been a bit more of a spread across the world:

QGIS online training users by country

The uptick in requests this year perhaps coinciding with people looking for things to do when they are at home in isolation.

This approach – create a series of videos that people watch and work through training guides – is one way to deliver online training. We thought we should identify some alternatives and how they might also be deployed.

We could deliver training workshops for our clients in exactly the same way – write a script, record a bunch of screencasts, record separate voice-overs, and then mash them all together with a blend of editing magic to create a course.  While great for our free online QGIS course, it’s not an adequate replacement for face-to-face classroom training.

Lately, we’ve been investigating the capacity of all of our different internet connections from home to see if we can offer a live-streaming style approach.  At the moment, most of us could do that, but there are always going to be issues – connections can drop for a bunch of reasons. So, if a live-streaming approach was going to happen (through whatever videoconferencing software our clients want us to use) it’d be best to break the training up into smaller pieces. This is an advantage, as it’s hard to focus on this type of videoconference for a long period of time (although we’re all getting used to it!).

We’ve also been looking at what schools are doing, using systems such as Google Classroom.  Through this platform, in particular, you can create a nice blend of the two approaches: put together teaching materials, set up videoconferencing sessions to cover those materials, and then combine them with the available assessment frameworks.  With training courses due for some projects in the next few months, we’re working on how these tools may be able to help deliver them, in these new circumstances we find ourselves in.

Necessity is certainly the mother of invention! In the last couple of weeks we’ve gone from having simple stored videos to creating full classes in Google Classroom, so we should be able to resume custom training for all of our clients within another week or so once we finalise our trials.  And then, perhaps, all the people on this map (showing where people who have asked for training live) can have an even better experience!

If you are interested in some classroom based remote training (or even in being our guinea pigs in a couple of external ones that we intend to trial in the next few weeks), then please get in touch with us via training@gaiaresources.com.au and let us know what you are interested in!  Or you can drop us a line on our social media streams – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Stay safe and healthy, and see you online!

Piers

The post Remote training options appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Discussing the important matters of fire escapes and where to buy the best coffee.

When writing the course material, we ask ourselves:

• what skills and outcomes should people who are completely new to GIS gain from this course?
• what are the most effective teaching / learning formats?

1. Course outcomes

For someone with no prior GIS experience, being thrown in the deep end can be very daunting. There is a steep learning curve when getting acquainted with a new user interface, spatial data types, and some of the more “WTF?” concepts of GIS. Our aim is to present the material in a way that makes sense to a novice and have them leave the course with an understanding of the fundamentals, as well as practical experience in using the QGIS software. The way in which we achieve this is discussed below.

2. Effective teaching and learning

It’s well-established that humans aren’t machines, ergo have variations in both their abilities and the ways in which they learn. There are, however, trends we can use to best direct how we run our QGIS training. Consider the VARK learning styles model, which breaks learning styles into four categories, with research showing that the majority of people (61%) learn best through employing two or more modes. In our QGIS course, we present the material using a combination of all four modes – a detailed, step-by-step user guide; live demonstrations on the big screen; interactive, practical exercises; and a trainer that won’t shut up describes key learning points and who encourages discussion.

The VARK learning styles.

An essential part of being able to teach a beginner in any topic is being able to put yourself in their shoes and present the main learning points in a logical and digestible manner. We achieve this in a number of ways in our QGIS course, such as:

• providing visual learning aids such as demonstrations and an animated slideshow,
• providing examples that relate to the attendee’s careers and roles,
• combining self-paced, supervised exercises together with the trainer working through exercises on the projector screen (without ‘doing the work’ for people),
• asking attendees to answer questions after each learning module,
• varying the pace and teaching style throughout the day to cater for mental fatigue, and
• maintaining engagement and focus through (poor) humour and the occasional (terrible) analogy. Humour is an effective teaching tool for engaging participants and redirecting focus.

As a trainer, the most satisfying part of my job is seeing people have “Aha! moments” – those moments where they suddenly understand the fundamentals of a topic they have previously been baffled by. Anecdotally, I’ve mostly encountered Aha! moments when drawing diagrams or using analogies.

In Darwin, we inadvertently created a wave of Aha! moments on the topic of Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS). Our training data focuses on an area in southern WA, but for the Darwin training Chris put together an exercise looking at a national park in the NT. This simple switch in geolocation forced attendees to apply what they’d learnt about CRS, and switch from a WA-centric CRS to one that worked for the NT. Several people commented that they finally understood CRS. This is a great example of how talking about a topic won’t necessarily get the point across to someone, yet a simple additional step – making them apply that concept to a practical exercise – helps the penny drop.

Chris answers the tough questions during one of our one-day courses in Darwin.

Every time we run the QGIS training we take away valuable observations and user feedback, and we are continually improving the course content and how it is delivered. We’re looking to bring our Beginner’s course to regional parts of WA and other States in Australia, and we’re currently working on new material for a potential Intermediate course (so stay tuned)!

If you’d like to attend our QGIS Beginner’s Course, or even discuss a more tailored training program for you or your staff, please drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tracey

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