Over 120 people attended over the 21st and 22nd June 2018, coming from as far afield as Kalgoorlie, Karratha and NSW and including representatives from the three levels of government, EIA practitioners, botanical (and zoological) consultants, universities, community groups and mining companies.

A full house (thanks to ECA for the image).

DAY 1
Session 1: a panel discussion by representatives from the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER), Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) Strategy and Guidance, Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety (DMIRS) and the Federal Department of Energy and Environment (DoEE) discussing guidance materials, scope and quality of survey reports, indirect impacts, assessment time-frames and strong advice to consult with agencies early.

Session 2: community involvement in botanical EIA including how they are conducted on public lands, the responsibilities that consultant botanists have more broadly in EIA.

Session 3: legal frameworks that govern botanical EIA, including clearing regulation history and updates to the drafting new Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 regulations (due to come into effect on the 1st January 2019).

Session 4: technical discussions with a specialist flora and vegetation consultant views on ensuring robust technical surveys, followed by EPA’s expectations of botanical survey reports and discussion with representatives from the WA Biodiversity Science Institute on leveraging aggregated biodiversity data.

DAY 2
Session 1: practitioners views on how flora and vegetation surveys operate within EIA process, including a NSW perspective from guest-speaker Dr John Hunter and an end-user perspective from WA consultant Kelli McCreery.

Session 2: national flora taxonomy initiatives by Dr Kevin Thiele including the Decadal Plan for Taxonomy, and case studies from Malcolm Trudgen and Geoff Cockerton illustrating how much more there is to know about our flora.

Session 3: challenges in classifying and describing our vegetation reliably and comparably, including the rationale behind plot-based surveys and the science of phytosociology that might underpin them. Greg Keighery elaborated on the (sometimes poor) definition of Threatened and Priority ecological communities (TECs and PECs).

Session 4: covered allied knowledge domains such as WA soil and geology, and the need for fungi to be included in surveys for EIA. The symposium was then wrapped up with a group discussion.

Some important issues that came up during the conference (from our perspective) included:

• environmental consultants and regulators rely on quality data/information to do their jobs well; this event was in part to help each understand the others’ data/info needs that could streamline approvals;
• consultants were trying to find out what causes delays in approvals, and where to find guidelines and standard practices;
• regulators were acknowledging being swamped and behind but stressed the importance of early dialogue and providing good quality data (eg. targeted data against the key flora/fauna objectives for that specific project area);
• understanding the ramifications of requirements for survey compliance and report submissions (eg. IBSA)
• reviewing the current data collection methods (pen/paper, tablets, phones etc.);
• the need for standardisation of data capture;
• solving the apparent lack of information defining WA’s TECs and PECs;
• lobbying for reliable ongoing taxonomic resources — for identification, names data, and the circumscription of new species, such as the work of the WA Herbarium and FloraBase, for a national maintained and comprehensive eFlora; or for the WA Biodiversity Science Institute.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing systems for capturing, managing or analysing environmental data, then please leave a comment below – or email us directly: alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au or Chris.Roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex and Chris

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Over time, Gaia Resources has been involved in a wide variety of field data collection projects with different clients from a wide range of client bases, so I think we’re pretty well suited to be able to comment on this area.  The talk I gave is embedded below, and it might not be quite what you were expecting.

I struggled with this talk, because as my bio stated, I am a technology junkie.  While I firmly believe that mobile data capture can help fauna surveys, this will require investment from the survey practitioners to develop tools that are tailored to the different workflows that they use (and in this climate, sometimes that’s hard to justify).  This is also plagued by the expectation that we see a lot – that technology is a “magic bullet”, and this isn’t the case.

The workshop wasn’t just about technology, though.  We had talks from the regulators, from practitioners and from solution providers like ourselves; there were also some interactive elements like workshops on survey methodologies for threatened species.  For me the highlights included some direction from the Office of the Environmental Protection Authority, an update on the Western Australian Biodiversity Science Institute and the innovative technology talks on thermal cameras, acoustics and drones (spot the technology junkie again?).  It was also great to talk to a range of practitioners around our support for Quantum GIS (including our training courses, one of which is coming up soon – stay tuned), and other work that was relevant.  And, I had a very pleasant trip back down memory lane along the way.

Back in the day, I was once employed to do field surveys myself.  I am by no means an expert in anything but as a generalist I have an interest in a lot (as a few of my Facebook friends will have seen from my latest forays into fungi identification).  But I was taught some very robust techniques and what to consider in terms of survey from some very experienced biologists from Biota and the Western Australian Museum.  Along the way I learned a lot about survey techniques and what to consider – except how bad that yellow hat was.

Yep, that’s a younger version of me, disappearing into a rock pile in the Pilbara in the “good old days”

Anyway, back to technology -I use a custom mobile app that we built in-house for my own bird surveys, and I love using it.  It has been tailored for my own use; for example, the autocomplete field for species names means that my data entry is about as fast as I think you can make it on a mobile device.  The fields on the form are arranged in such a way that I can enter the name, number if they are transient (e.g. flying overhead – these are things that might not be actually using the habitat I am surveying) and then hit “Save and Continue”.  The forms take care of the time, date, location (to a defined accuracy) all automatically, and I end up with  very detailed point dataset of all of my sightings.  In addition, I flick out of the recording form regularly to view the species accumulation curves I’m getting to see if I’m starting to tail off on the curve or if I still have a way to go (something you inherently know, but this does help to make you think about it).

 Example screenshots from the internal app I use for birding

I haven’t been birding for a while now, so when I’m in this “rusty” state for field identifications, the time it takes me for data entry is a small fraction of the time I spend searching and trying to identify those Small Brown Jobs (SBJs) or that faint call I just heard.  So for me, this is a robust data entry mechanism that can keep up with me – but I’ll readily admit I can easily get out-data-entered by someone who can immediately do their identifications who is armed with a trusty notebook and pencil.  But I know I can create a species list or site map from all my digital data much quicker than they can (and usually when Dad and I go for a survey, we check those out in the car or cafe afterwards)! The back end system that you use with your field data collection can really add to the success of the field work.

This experience means that at Gaia Resources we look at the problems that clients bring to us and we look at how we can holistically help them solve their problems with technology – and sometimes the best thing we can do is to tell them to wait, or that we don’t have the magic bullet that they are looking for.  However, I’m pretty sure in the near future we’ll be rolling our new solutions for the environmental consulting industry, based off a range of things that James and I saw at the workshop.

If you want to have a chat about some of the tools that I mentioned in my talk for field data capture, or how we can help your organisation with tools like QGIS, then feel free to call (08 92277309), email me or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

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