[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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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

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Farmers like Mark Desaliy can use the app to monitor fires near their stations.

Our initial release of the North Australia and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) app for iOS and Android back in February brings the most used fire information resource for land managers in Australia to your phone, allowing you to keep a constant eye on bushfire threats. You can view maps of satellite generated fire activity (hotspots) and burnt areas (fire scars) provided by the NAFI service. There’s a good summary back in March from Rohan Fisher on ABC Radio – Kimberley.

At a regional scale like this area in northern NT and WA, the NAFI app represents real-time hotspots through a heat map clustering algorithm.

Just to recap on how the app works behind the scenes to provide you with real-time fire information:

• The hotspot locations are updated several times a day and the fire scars are updated up to once or twice a week depending on fire conditions.
• The fire scars are produced by the NAFI Service and the hotspots are sourced from Landgate WA and Geoscience Australia.
• Base maps for imagery and topography can be downloaded for offline use in your region of interest, and then used for when you go outside of mobile data range.
• Burnt area mapping covers the Australian Savannas and rangelands that comprise around 70% of Australia, but does not cover NSW, VIC or the heavily populated regions of QLD, WA and SA.

So how popular is the NAFI app – well we can monitor a number of analytics using iOS AppStoreConnect and Google Play console, or the Firebase dashboard. These are configurable dashboards that can tell us things like how many installations occurred by day or week, how many are actively used, and filtered by operating system or device type. As of today, the iOS app has been downloaded 288 times since it’s initial release, and the Android version 142 times.

AppStoreConnect dashboard for the iOS NAFI app provides statistics of installations by week since the mid-February release.
Google Play Console shows the increase in installations of the Android NAFI app over time since the mid-February release.

We expect installations to continue upwards in the month of May and beyond, as more people on the ground become aware of the benefits and utility of the app. There are two phases of bushfire related activity  where the app can be useful, associated with the early Dry season burn programs and carbon (emission reduction) projects, and the late Dry season bushfire response.

The statistics are anonymised so we are not tracking personal information, but what the out-of-the-box analytics does help us to understand are the trends, and – along with ratings and word of mouth – we get a bit more insight into how people are reacting to the app. This can then feed into our strategy with clients on helping them target marketing campaigns and prioritise enhancements. We also utilise Firebase Crashlytics as a way of logging the details of any crashes and error messages received, and this really helps us get quickly to the root cause of a technical issue a particular user is experiencing.

Please be aware if you are using the app:

• Hotspot location on any map may only be accurate to within 1.5 km
• The hotspot symbol on the maps does not indicate the size of the fire
• Some fires may be small, brief, or obscured by smoke or cloud and go undetected
• Satellites detect other heat sources such as smokestacks

For more information visit: https://savannafiremapping.com/nafi-mobile-app/

If you would like to know more about our projects with the NAFI team, or want to strike up a conversation by sending me an email or getting in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

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Gaia Resources worked closely with the NAFI team to design and build the app, which you can now download onto your device from the Apple Store or Google Play Store.

The release coincides with the 2021 Savanna Fire Forum being run remotely from Darwin to over 150 participants.  Available for Android and iOS, the app enables land owners, indigenous rangers, conservation scientists, pastoralists and others to get near real-time fire information across 80% of the Australian continent. It is part of a bunch of support we have been providing to NAFI and other fire management groups in recent years (click here for a snapshot of previous blogs), and we are really excited about our contribution up in the Top End.

On the surface the app simply reflects the powerful data products available from the NAFI website that are already used extensively across projects and programs in the north of Australia to monitor savanna burning programs and bushfires.  Fire scars are displayed representing remotely sensed burnt areas coloured by the month of the fire, as are thermal hotspots detected from an array of satellites. These data layers are presented in an intuitive mapping interface with a small selection of base maps, location and compass direction functionality.

The NAFI app starts with a view of your region (left), presents a legend and layer selector (middle left), provides topo and imagery base maps (middle right) and near real-time hotpots (right).

In this initial release, the idea is to get the data out there onto mobile devices, and the NAFI team are keen to have that drive discussion about enhancements that will deliver high value to people working in the field and planning their fire management activities. This could be planners and rangers on carbon abatement programs focused on early dry season controlled burns, or community and government organisations battling raging bushfires, like the one that swept through 87,000 hectares of the World Heritage Listed Fraser Island last December (here is a link to the most recent article on that event).

An earlier test version of the app (left) during the December, 2020 Fraser Island fire. Image source: The Australian.

When you start using the app, you’ll notice a few little gems in there that are all focused on increasing the accessibility and usefulness of that NAFI data. So let’s start with the near real-time aspect:

• the app checks for updates regularly, with hotspots updated every 20 minutes on average, and fire scars updated 2-3 times per week,
• data is pulled down dynamically from the NAFI server and processed on AWS cloud-based infrastructure,
• the data is then automatically uploaded to the person’s device whenever they have the app running with a mobile data connection.

Next, let’s consider the offline capabilities:

• the app allows you to download base maps (OpenMapTiles imagery or NAFI’s Topographic map) for your region(s) of interest,
• you can continue to work outside of a mobile data connection, with the most recent fire scar and hotspot data from when you were last online and had the app running,
• the location marker and compass direction give you geographical context online or offline.

Hundreds of thousands of hotspots are rendered seamlessly using a heatmap algorithm. To overcome a performance constraint for mobile devices, we have devised a rendering algorithm that can render tens of thousands concurrent hotspot points across Australia into temporal heat map clusters. People using the app can get that regional view of hot spots and visualise three different fire age groupings in purple (0-6hrs), red (6-24hrs) and blue (24-48hrs). The app also features some high resolution fire scar mapping of the Darwin area sourced from Sentinel satellite imagery, as part of a trial implementation with BushfiresNT. The continental scale fire scar mapping is based on MODIS satellite imagery (250m resolution), so the new Sentinel based mapping based on much higher resolution imagery is an exciting new space to keep an eye on.

Being an initial release, the NAFI team are looking for feedback future versions, or just to hear what you think – there’s a direct feedback link in the app itself too. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to reach out to us and start up a conversation by sending me an email or getting in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Chris

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Earth Observation Australia (EOA) is a community group for all people who collect and use earth observation data in Australia, to have a forum to present and discuss their activities and define their needs for support from industry, academia and government.  Membership of EOA is free and open to anyone with any professional or personal interest in earth observation (EO). We are a collective group that provides a coordinating and sharing point for all people using images collected from satellite, airborne or any other EO platform (like the ones shown below), and for any purpose in Australia.

Landsat 5 image of Lake Eyre, South Australia (provided by Geoscience Australiaa)

My own interest in EOA comes from working as a spatial professional for many years with remotely sensed imagery, particularly from satellites. EO data is now an important and often critical information resource for all sections of government, research and industry and I am very excited to be able to learn from and contribute to EOA and to these inclusive and informative webinars.

The Whole of Community webinars are held every two months and provide the current status and future plans for national and state earth observation activities across government, research and industry in Australia. Government, research and industry leads are invited to update the community on their respective activities and questions and comments may be posted into the chat windows for review and comment.

At the conclusion of each webinar, we encourage attendees to provide feedback via an online survey, so that we can improve this series, which has been successfully providing updates to the broader EO community since 2013.  In addition, the slides, chats and recording from each webinar are posted onto the EOA website shortly after its conclusion – you can find this one online at this link.

Each webinar contributes to the aims of EOA to support the vision of the Australian Earth Observation Community Plan 2026 (the “2026 Plan”). This vision states that by 2026, the Australian Earth Observation sector will develop and deliver high-quality EO information, infrastructure and services that are used widely by government, industry, research and the community, in Australia and internationally.

The 2026 Plan delivers a unifying focus to motivate and guide the Australian Earth Observation community to take a coordinated set of actions that will advance Australia’s Earth Observation capability, while growing innovative partnerships across government, industry, research and education, to ensure Australia’s economy, governments, society and environments can be sustained and improved.

Ideal Components of a Coordinated EO Capability in Australia (image from the 2026 Plan, which you can download here)

My role as host was to present the current priority actions of the Steering Committee and the Working Groups of EOA for Q1 2019 and then to introduce each of our guest speakers and their presentations, which I have listed below:

• Update on the Earth Observation Forum 2020 by Karen Joyce of James Cook University
• Update on Digital Earth Australia (DEA) by Claire Krause of Geoscience Australia (GA)
• Update on DEA Industry Consultation by Eva Rodriguez of FrontierSI
• Update on Australia–International EO Collaborations and GEO XVI Plenary & Ministerial Summits by Jonathon Ross of GA
• Update on CSIRO EO activities by Kimberley Clayfield of CSIRO
• Update on National Collaborative Research Infrastructure & EO by Stuart Phinn of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland and Chair of the EOA Steering Committee
• Update on the Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA) activities by Stuart Phinn on behalf of Deanna Hutchison, Chair of the SIBA|GITA
• Update on National EO Analytics Hub/SmartSAT CRC by Stuart Phinn
• Update on the Australian Space Agency activities by Joe Andrews of the Australian Space Agency

If you would like more detail on any of the topics above, a full recording of the webinar is available from the EOA website.

The next Earth Observation Australian Whole of Community webinar will be held on Thursday 11 April 2019 from 11am to 12noon (Brisbane time). I would encourage anyone to join us for more updates from Australia’s leading government, research and industry professionals when they present the next updates to Earth Observation activities in Australia.  When the details are published on the EOA website they will be available here, including details of how to join.

Floodwaters in the Georgina River, Western Queensland. This Landsat 8 image is displayed with spectral bands 6, 5 and 3. Image supplied by the United States Geological Survey and processed by the Queensland Government’s Remote Sensing Centre.

In the meantime, if you like any information on what benefits that earth observation imagery can provide your profession or business, please feel free to contact me directly at sylvia.michael@gaiaresources.com.au or phone me in the Brisbane office on (07) 3063 0418.

Sylvia

P.S. For your information, the banner images used in this blog are taken from the EOA website and are excellent examples of the capabilities and beauty of EO data.

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Day 1-2: Savanna Fire Forum 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 3 – Emissions Reduction Fund workshop

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

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

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

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

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

Chris

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Resources companies in Western Australia and elsewhere will be working through plans to extract precious minerals from their operations, which typically involves years of exploration drilling by carving a narrow grid of tracks through the outback bush land, with the rigs drilling small regularly spaced holes to see what rock types exist below the surface. They analyse the rock samples and map their findings, and refine their search – eventually honing in on a deposit. Once and ore body is properly defined and mining is to go ahead, then the haulage roads, infrastructure and accommodation camps are put in place so extraction and processing can begin.

Why is an environmental technology consultancy blogging about open pit mines and exploration activities?

Well, if you work in Western Australia or another mining hub in the world, you will know that one of the greatest positive impacts you can make on the environment is to help mining companies achieve best practice in environmental management. Western Australia have some of the most comprehensive environmental protection regulations in the world; and while mining companies are subject to environmental approval conditions and regular reporting, Gaia Resources provides an important service in helping them collect, manage and make informed decisions on their environmental data, and help them manage the land they are custodians of. Once you strip back all the technology and data considerations, what this is really about is giving companies information based on solid evidence. This can get pretty tricky in areas where decades of exploration activity has occurred – and so a GIS overlaying several layers (drilling collars, tracks, georeferenced plans, rehab data, multiple years of imagery) becomes very important to develop an accurate picture.

So how can we meet our core goal of supporting those that work with the environment in this space?

Ground disturbance mapping

For many years now Gaia Resources has been working alongside mining companies to map and analyse ground disturbance in support of their MRF (Mine Rehabilitation Fund) reporting and AER (Annual Environmental Reporting). We’ve blogged about this topic in previous years (2013, 2014, 2016, 2016 again, 2017) but have been involved in this work since 2005.  In fact we are just finalising this process for another new client (we’ll release a project update on that soon).

Ground disturbance mapping in the Goldfields of Western Australia.

Disturbance mapping is a multi-year process – in year one we acquire aerial or satellite imagery, and create a benchmark dataset of cleared or disturbed land within the tenements held by the mining company. Then subsequent years is about monitoring change by adding new disturbed areas, and noting where rehabilitation works have been done. The aggregated areas (of clearing and rehabilitation) are reported per tenement to calculate MRF bond deposit levies on the regulator‘s system EARS2; but also to compare clearing against Programs of Work (there’s another DMIRS system to manage that process) and against any specific environmental approval condition limits. For the disturbance mapping to work across several years it is important that we process the imagery to match up perfectly, to avoid under- or over-estimating cleared areas. We also make use of powerful GIS toolsets in QGIS to work efficiently across large tracts of land.

Data process and technology

We also help mining companies assess the health of their data management practices and implement technology change to improve timely staff access to spatial information. For mining companies this is often about establishing a ‘single point of truth’ for important spatial datasets and treating those sets of information as corporate assets – with on-going maintenance, ownership and accountability  – rather than just a means to create maps. We also look at the data life cycle – how the organisation collects spatial data in the field, how they use it in their business processes, and its value for re-use. We then spot technology opportunities like mobile mapping software, database upgrades and automated data processing packages to increase data quality and accessibility.

All this means that the mining company can not only be more efficient, but they can more adequately and defensibly manage and protect the important environmental assets that are potentially impacted upon by their activities.

Mining and Not for Profit projects

Gaia Resources also do some important work with Not For Profit organisations who partner with mining companies to implement regional and community strategies for threatened species and natural resource management. For instance, we help the Great Victoria Biodiversity Trust to analyse a range of Goldfields data layers and develop survey locations for Malleefowl monitoring (see previous blog). The in-kind support provided by mining companies (e.g. IT resources, transport and accommodation) supports environmental management research and programs.

On the other side of the coin, we also do work with regulators like the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, and the Office of the Environmental Protection Agency to streamline the spatial data management side of their environmental approvals processes (here’s another link to a blog on that topic).

The bigger picture – working with miners, regulators and NFP partners to conserve habitat for the likes of the Malleefowl (right) and understand cumulative environmental impacts.

This is all about the bigger picture for us as a company.  We are looking for win-win situations that minimise the collective footprint on the land and conserves fragile ecosystems. Mining companies benefit through streamlined data management and visualistion, and richer information products to support their core business activities.  We think it’s important to put our efforts into areas where we can make a difference – ground disturbance, data processes and technology and supporting not-for-profit programs are key parts of achieving our corporate goals.

If you want to talk to us about ground disturbance or environmental regulations, then drop me a line at chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

The post A disturbance in the force appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Malleefowl in their natural habitat (top) – Photo © Nye Edwards; Jake Geddes and me in our natural habitat (bottom).

Citing Wikipedia, “the Malleefowl is a stocky ground-dwelling Australian bird about the size of a domestic chicken. They are notable for the large nesting mounds constructed by the males and lack of parental care after the chicks hatch.”

In the Western Australian  wheatbelt, populations are now considered to be highly isolated and fragmented, and continue to be threatened by habitat clearing, competition for food with introduced herbivores, predation by foxes and cats, and increased frequency of wildfires and prescribed burning (Source: Benshemesh, 2007, DPAW, 2016)  Not much is known about Malleefowl presence and habitat in the massive Great Victorian Desert; which, as the largest of Australia’s deserts, equally spans Western Australia and South Australia. Similar threats impact the Malleefowl in the Great Victoria Desert (GVD), with wildfires considered as the biggest threat in this sparsely populated part of the State.

Geographic range of Nganamara across Australia (Source: DPAW, 2016)

There are direct and indirect sightings of the bird primarily in the Southwest corner of the GVD, recorded by mining companies and consultants, with data stored in a centralised database (NatureMap) managed by the Department of Parks and Wildlife. These sites tend to centre around mines and nearby tenements. Elsewhere records are sparse and isolated across the GVD expanse. Did I mention how big the Great Victorian Desert is? The map below only shows half of it (the other half being in South Australia)!

Malleefowl locations are located primarily in the Southwest portion of the GVD (Source: Malleefowl in the GVD Report (DPAW, 2016)).

I worked with our GIS Analyst Jake Geddes to source and analyse  a set of mapping layers – including Beard’s Vegetation Complexes, Fire Scars, Landsat Satellite imagery, roads and tracks. The first challenge was to define ‘likely Malleefowl habitat’ – and through discussions and a workshop with key stakeholders in the Malleefowl conservation arena, we were able to massage the mapping layers into a suitability map book containing areas of High, Moderate and Low suitability. We started with categorising Vegetation complexes containing the right vegetation assemblages, then subtracted areas of recent wildfire burns (e.g. in the last 10 years). The resulting areas were still very broad, but Landsat imagery helped to focus in on smaller patches of dark vegetation we interpreted to be candidates for the dense Mulga stands that Malleefowl like to call home.

Our interpretation was backed up – at least in the Southwest corner of the GVD – by a strong correlation (e.g. proximity to) known Malleefowl mounds. We also brought some on-ground experience to bear, by getting the fauna consultant (Jeff Turpin) – who recorded some of those mound locations – to corroborate our findings.

Landsat 8 imagery near the Tropicana mine. The dark patches are interpreted as high likelihood Malleefowl habitat.

The second challenge was to take the thousands of candidate areas, and nominate a smaller set of potential survey locations. The GVDBT want these survey sites to be accessible and evenly distributed (geographically), including across a range of categories and land use types (e.g. parks and reserves, mining tenements, pastoral leases, native title boundaries). This is so we can learn more about the bird’s habitat across a range of environmental and land use criteria. To do this we have ignored very small patches of suitable habitat. We then identified the sealed and unsealed roads that surveyors could travel on to get to the remaining potential sites. This is where we ran into a bit of a hitch; we know there are many roads through the GVD, but little data is readily available. So we have used the best publicly available roads dataset from Geoscience Australia. Taking into account survey methods that consist of short walks from these roads, we have excluded areas that are more than a few kilometres trek from the beaten path.

Our site selection process includes 100 randomly selected and stratified sites with representation of known Malleefowl mounds, high, moderate and low (inferred) suitability. The 100 sites are spread out across the GVD so we have good geographic representation, and includes a good scattering of sites in different land use types. To choose the sites we facilitated two workshops with stakeholders – the first focused on the technical methodology for site selection, and the second was a review of the selected sites.

Example of a site selection based on a hexagonal survey area within buffer of accessible roads data, and high suitability of habitat based on Landsat imagery.

So the long and short of it is, we had our work cut out for us, but this has been a fascinating project. Our hope is that with all this data crunching and science, we can add value to the more important survey effort and through this can contribute to the collective knowledge of Malleefowl habitat in the GVD.

This was a great project that featured a range of spatial analysis, and if you’d like to find out how we can help you with similar projects, contact me directly in the Perth office on (08) 92277309, email or Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

The post Fantastic Malleefowl and Where To Find Them appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our initial discussions with Ross were focused around breakaways and how these could be mapped and analysed. Starting off with a few trial stations we derived breakaways from Landgate’s morphology dataset and terrain discontinuities from Geoscience Australia’s Geodata 1:250k series. Specifically, we extracted the slopes from Geoscience Australia’s 1 second Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Derived Digital Elevation Model (which has around a 30m resolution) and identified medium priority (10 – 15 degrees) and high priority (+15 degrees) areas, with low priority areas populated at the edge of rivers and waterbodies.

Some example preliminary maps from the process

In the second phase of the project we merged the above to form general areas to prioritise. As we had breakaways/discontinuities (lines) and slope above 10 degrees (polygons) we needed to do some data manipulation in order to create a propbability style heatmap, which was hoped to be able to show the areas where the baiting program should focus on. So we just ran a simple script to convert both the lines and polygons into points (centroids), and from this heatmaps were processed for the stations to enhance highly dense areas.

The final phase was to produce these results for a further 80 stations. With a combination of a mapbook layout, dynamic raster loading on each station, and complimentary layers each station now had its own prioritised areas for future dog baiting, like the one shown below.

An example product, showing areas with higher probabilities for the presence of feral dogs

From these initial studies and analyses we are hoping to extend the project with GNRBA to produce additional products that are ready to be provided to the pilots who do the baiting, so that they can be more targeted in their baiting of areas, and to have these updated regularly based on additional exclusion areas.  All this will help the GNRBA and the stations protect their stock, and their local environment, in a more targeted way.

If you found this interesting and would like to know more, then get in touch with me through the comment section below, email or through one of our social media streams such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Jake

The post Helping protect the Goldfields Nullarbor region appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This was a pilot survey so SBR can assess the viability of using drones periodically for their environmental monitoring requirements. We contracted Andrew Moore from Aerial Environment to undertake the survey, and I was there more as a glorified bird watcher (who knows as much about birds as the next person who doesn’t know about birds) and to help optimise SBR’s GIS systems – spotting birds is actually quite critical given the tendency of Wedgies to rip drones from the sky (we were lucky enough to see two of these majestic creatures but luckily not in the middle of a flight).

Flight from Shark Bay to Useless Loop on a 1965 Cessna 182H – Approaching a salt stack

While some time was spent grappling with our testosterone levels in between flights (picture three blokes in a ute with high vis discussing the intricacies of Thermomixes) we made good ground in the allocated 1.5 days capturing a range of seagrass, mangrove and revegetation areas.  Cloud cover was a bit of an issue with the varying light levels but for the most part it was perfect drone flying weather. Pre-setting the flight plan and watching the drone take off and do its thing in such a beautiful setting was quite other worldly (click on the images to enlarge).

Flying the drone and propping up a ute

A preliminary look at the data revealed some fantastic results. A number of different flight heights were trialled ranging from around 60 metres to no more than 118 metres and subsequent resolution ranged from just over 3 cm to around 6 cm.

Seagrass delineation

Some stands of Mangroves in the Shark Bay area have quite small crowns (in higher salinity areas), so capturing high resolution imagery is extremely beneficial for the monitoring of individual crowns and therefore the overall health of the system; depending on the consistency of imagery capture there is the potential for automated raster classification, something we are looking into for SBR.

Mangroves – individual plants clearly visible

Mangroves – preliminary raster classification

It is also possible to decipher individual species from the revegetation areas.

Revegetation – individual species visible

A high resolution Digital Surface Model is shown below, which reveals clear gradients of individual rocks and boulders beneath the surface of the water (top right), and that is our ute on the bottom left.

Digital Surface Model – see our mode of transport bottom left

There are obviously many other options with collecting imagery over and above orthorectification/stitching for your classical basemap, including oblique shots, contours, 3D models, high definition videos and with the increasing development of light-weight sensors for drones the remote sensing options will become limitless.

How many people does it take to fly a drone? Apparently three (bottom left)

And I couldn’t resist introducing you to Ray, the site manager, who was particularly interested in the drone (we later spotted him on the captured imagery).

Ray – Site Manager

If you are interested in finding out how we can help you with your drone mapping needs or ideas, then leave me a comment below, email me directly here or you can start a conversation with us via Twitter, LinkedIn or our Facebook page.

James

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My name is Pauline, and I am 17 years old, in my last year of high school at Kent Street Senior High School.  One of my subjects is Workplace Learning, where we get work experience on Thursdays with businesses.  I’ve already done three days of work experience with a child care centre in South Perth but I also wanted to get some more experience in an Information Technology business.  A friend of my Mum knows Gaia Resources and arranged for me to get some time with them.

On my first day, I was nervous and shy!  Andrew took me to Mel to start on my work experience.  She taught me about GIS, including latitude, longitude and a range of other things.  We started mapping in QGIS with Botany Bay first and then around Western Australia and even Korea.  I made my own map (with colours!) that was very bright.  This first day was very interesting, with the highlight being that I made my own map, and how to use GIS, although I have had some problems getting QGIS installed on my Mac at home!

Piers took me to Owain from Geoimage and we started by writing down steps as to how to search for satellite imagery using different browser tools.  Once I found the images, I then made a map using some other tools.  I got to look at satellite imagery from all over the world which was very interesting – like the one below.

This image is from the Himalayas – Imagery Courtesy of Geoimage Pty Ltd Copyright Airbus Defence & Space 2014

Ben took me for my third day and introduced me to programming through Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/).  I did some basic programming using the Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation lesson (https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/cs/programming).  I worked through around half of this lesson before we switched to web development, and created the demonstration page below.

This was my test page – which really hurt everyone’s eyes!

Once Ben and I had finished the page, then Serge tried to destroy it, but failed!  This was a good test of my page and introduced me to how testing works.

My second last day at Gaia Resources I was working with AJ.  He stared by explaining the network, panels, switch, firewalls, servers, routers and explained some network security to me as well (such as how hackers can’t get into the systems).  Then we collected equipment and tools to start making my own network cables.  AJ gave me the hardest job of my time here – I created my own network cables, and then wired up a patch panel and connected it to the network.  When I finished, I called AJ in to test my work, and we connected everything, and my work passed all the tests.  AJ said I was one of the few people who got it right first time!

My last day at Gaia Resources was with Piers (the boss).  We spent the morning talking about career and TAFE courses for next year and then we wrote this blog.

The things that I have experienced in Gaia Resources were some of my happiest and most interesting days at work.  Thank you for all your help and support and for teaching me new things.

Pauline

It has been great to have Pauline in here over the past few weeks, and we wish you all the best in your studies (and travels!) in the future.

Piers

Feel free to leave us a message below, or comment on our LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter pages.

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