The event featured speakers from the NAA, the City of Perth, the State Library of Western Australia (SLWA) and the State Record Office (SROWA).

Each of the speakers illustrated their talk with images from their collections.

• Taren Laurie (NAA) showed many pics of Perth built infrastructure and provided a quick intro to their RecordSearch tool.
• Kate Parker and Hannah Eames (City of Perth) focused on Perth Town Hall art, their spatial platform, and drew attention to the City’s podcast ‘Untold Stories of Perth‘.
• John Hughes (SLWA) gave an overview of the pictures and films of Leslie le Souef in their collection.
• Damien Hassan (SROWA) showed some of the architectural plans for Perth townsite (including underground toilets and tunnels of St Georges Terrace!) and attempted a quick demo of RetroMaps.

Damian Hassan from State Records Office illustrates RetroMap coverage around Perth

In question-time the speakers also referenced some archive aggregating services such as Collections WA and Culture WA.

Speaking of RetroMaps, this great project that we worked on with the SROWA last year, has been receiving some deserved attention recently. Damain Hassan, Senior Archivist at SROWA was interviewed for a news article and podcast broadcast last week on ABC Perth:

There has been great interest in this new site, and we look forward to assisting the SROWA mine and present their collections online in future projects. If you’d like to know more about Gaia Resources work in archives and collections then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Archives and RetroMaps appeared first on Gaia Resources.

More recent work focused on improvements in real-time data display of the drone position and radio tags, offline base-map useability and back-end data processing. Wildlife Drones have presented their integrated solution to conferences around Australia, and have a growing client base where our desktop app is a critical component contributing to important wildlife conservation efforts and research.

Debbie Saunders demonstrating the Wildlife Drones method

Dr Debbie Saunders, CEO of Wildlife Drones, gave us a great wrap:

“Gaia Resources did a wonderful job turning all our user interface ideas into reality.  Within a relatively short period of time we went from having a general idea of what we wanted to having a very impressive, incredibly user friendly and intuitive user interface.  This has dramatically increased our ability to demonstrate our technology to anyone who is interested.  All the feedback from customers, investors and the broader community has been overwhelming positive and we are also now thoroughly enjoying using our cutting edge technology with much greater ease.”

Wildlife Drones are currently working on a project looking at the differences in behaviour and movement of Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in burnt and non-burnt environments. In this recent article, Debbie says:

“Usually when you are tagging wild animals there are always some that disappear, there are always some that take off. You end up spending all your time and effort looking for the missing animals. When you are on the ground with a handheld receiver, you’re tracking one animal at the time, you’re taking hours. With the drone we can track [the signals of] 40 animals at the same time, we could see all of the koalas all the time.”

In the aftermath of last summers devastating bushfires there is a lot of work going on in New South Wales and Victoria to monitor remaining populations of Koala and drones are playing a crucial and time-saving role in this research.

Over much the same timeframe, Gaia Resources has been working with the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) to develop another approach to monitoring Koala populations, via the I Spy Koala citizen science app. There is clearly a role for both approaches to help save our dwindling Koala populations, and perhaps there may be some synergy between them.

More information about this project can be found in our blogs and project page. And you can hear more about Wildlife Drones direct from Debbie in this upcoming Environmental Institute webinar.

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this post, please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Drones for Wildlife appeared first on Gaia Resources.

As part of the project, the SROWA digitised and georeferenced 2,149 historical sewerage plans for the Perth area, thanks to a whole range of volunteers.  These resulting georeferenced images are pretty large – around the 400MB mark each – and provide an unparalleled, highly accurate and high resolution snapshot of the Perth metropolitan area, from dates ranging from 1910 through to 1964.

There were a number of challenges associated with making these maps available in a way that is performant, but also clean and consistent to provide an exceptional experience for anyone using the site.

The Challenge

We needed to make sure that our solution had the following characteristics:

• Simple and easy to use for SROWA, their clients, and the general public,
• It has the basic map tools to navigate easily and efficiently, including search capabilities,
• It will show the plans displayed “in the real world” (i.e. on a mapping interface), and
• The mapping interface should also show current satellite imagery.

In addition to these basic requirements, we also wanted to make sure that the solution:

• Delivered the plans in way that is most useful to as wide an audience as possible,
• Will be expandable to be able to add in other map series if they become available,
• Represents exceptional value for money in both the creation of the system and the ongoing maintenance of the system for SROWA, and
• Works with the existing investments that the SROWA have put into their internal systems.

No small challenge, and there were a couple of problems to deal with along the way…

The Problems

The first problem was reducing 2,149 large images (400MB) without losing the high resolution quality.  So, we used some pretty handy spatial software tools and developed a bunch of scripts to help deal with the volume of images and reduce the size (on average) to around 3 – 4% of the original image – with minimal loss of resolution.  We also put the site online using infrastructure from Amazon Web Services – which means we can scale it up really easily if the demand requires it (and in the meantime, it’s great value for money!).

The second problem, and the most time sapping task, was to deal with the “overlap” between the maps.  Each of the raw original plans overlaps the ones near to it (see figure below), so we needed to get around this to create a seamless mapping layer.

The maps when overlaid on each other block out parts of the map, so with our solution we had to remove these to make them more useful as a seamless layer.

We did this by digitising the “real world” boundaries of the maps (where there were actual features to see) and after some final checks and quality control we could now start stitching everything together.  Creating a seamless layer involved multiple spatial scripts and more free and open source spatial tools.  After a run through of the scripts, we had a nicely tiled map layer, all ready for use on the web.

But of course, you still need to be able to download the individual map tiles so that you can see all the important marginalia on the sides of them (like the date of the map) so we also were able to allow the maps to be individually downloaded from within the site itself.

Putting it together

The resultant Retromaps website was designed and developed to cope with the problems we had identified and delivered on the challenges we had set ourselves (and SROWA set us).  The resultant web site has seen a lot of people already signing up – there were over 7,000 people signing up on the first Saturday it was out, thanks to the launch being shared across a whole range of sites on social media.

An example of the sorts of detail and maps that you can see within the site – but go visit it for yourself!

When SROWA first approached us about this project, it was a bit of a dream job and a labour of love for us – we’re all about archives and spatial so to get the chance to pull these together has been a great opportunity.  It was something that we’ve been thinking about for some time (since our blog in 2015, “Hacking the Archives“) and it was great to see it come to fruition.

If you’d like to know more about RetroMaps and our work in archives or mapping (or both!), please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via jake.geddes@gaiaresources.com.au.

Jake

The post RetroMaps appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We combined skills in spatial interaction to query and visualise the available data with the transformation of resulting data into a well-formed PDF document.  The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was the obvious choice for data acquisition as they provide an good range of web services to programmatically access and harvest their aggregated data.

Here’s what the team came up with for Fungi in the time available (illustrated below). You can read more about the issues in the previous blog post.

The interface we developed (with one of the field guide PDF files overlaid) – click on the image or here to try it yourself.

Given the success of this demonstration, our developers very quickly modified the code to also provide a Field Guide for Insects and then a Field Guide for Green Plants.

The operation of the mapping interface remains the same:

1. select your family of interest, or leave it set to ‘ALL’ families. The available families in the drop-down have been generated from a query of the ALA;
2. select the drawing tool on the left to draw a polygon around your land area of interest. (note: from the layer selection icon in the top right you can choose to display a street-map or a satellite image base layer);
3. press ‘Scan’ to display the available points within your defined area;
4. click on a point to display some metadata about the record;
5. it is possible to select a different family to display and the results will be automatically displayed;
6. when you have your preferred data set, hit ‘PDF’ to generate a field guide to the area;
7. a well-formed PDF document containing a table of species ordered alphabetically by family, genus and species, as illustrated in the inset above;
8. each table row ideally contains a referenced image (so that you can follow up on the creator and usage information), scientific name and author, family, and the contributing dataset.

This project continues to provide informative case studies for producing useful products from authoritative public datasets. It could be expanded upon and further configured to produce field guides for any other major taxonomic group. Given more time we would have liked to add point clustering and record counts to the map, a dynamically generated drop-down list of only the families occurring in the defined area and improved image attribution. The layout of the PDF could be further refined with the inclusion of a map of the area queried, a species index, and refined content presentation.

We’d again like to acknowledge the ALA for its continuing commitment to aggregating the scientific resources to provide a national view of Australia’s biodiversity, and the many image and data contributors to the ALA.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on these webmaps or have the need for a customised version of these online tools, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Dynamic Field Guides for Insects and Flora too appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Why not try out this prototype phenology tool that I’ve also prepared using the ‘wandoo’ data yourself? Then leave a comment below, start a chat with me via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Phenological analysis of Eucalyptus wandoo for honey bee foraging appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Heres another gauntlet thrown down by Piers: assemble a GIS tiger team for fifty hours to explore ‘what can you do help people visualise readily available spatial data for a significant group of organisms in their particular area of interest AND let them download a field guide for just those taxa’.

Barbara and Jake G. tackled the spatial side of the question while Jake T. explored ways to transform the resulting data into a well-formed PDF document.  The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was the first choice as they provide an impressive range of web services to programmatically access and harvest their aggregated data.

Here’s what the team came up with (illustrated below).

Drawing on large data sets presents its own issues, and there are some 750,000 fungi specimen and observation records available in the ALA. For query and presentation responsiveness we chose to limit the query to just one large order in Kingdom Fungi – the Agaricales.  Similarly, limits to the number of records retrieved (500) were also implemented in case the area drawn is very large.  Currently, the tool is aimed at medium-size areas, such as Bold Park, a coastal conservation reserve in Perth, as illustrated below.

The interface we developed (with one of the field guide PDF files overlaid) – click on the image or here to try it yourself.

So here’s how you use the mapping interface:

1. select your fungal family of interest, or leave it set to ‘ALL’ families. The available families in the drop-down have been generated from a query of the ALA;
2. select the drawing tool on the left to draw a polygon around your land area of interest. (note: from the layer selection icon in the top right you can choose to display a street-map or a satellite image base layer);
3. press ‘Scan’ to display the available points within your defined area;
4. click on a point to display some metadata about the record;
5. it is possible to select a different family to display and the results will be automatically displayed;
6. when you have your preferred data set, hit ‘PDF’ to generate a field guide to the area;
7. a well-formed PDF document containing a table of species ordered alphabetically by family, genus and species, as illustrated in the inset above;
8. each table row ideally contains a referenced image (so that you can follow up on the creator and usage information), scientific name and author, family, and the contributing dataset.

This project provides an informative case study for producing useful products from authoritative public datasets. It could be expanded upon and further configured to produce field guides for any major taxonomic group.

Given more time we would have liked to add to the map point clustering and record counts, and a dynamically generated drop-down list of only the families occurring in the defined area and we’d really like to do more on attributing those images properly!

We uncovered some technical issues also, such as repeated 404 timeouts with retrieving ALA data, and noted the lack of map tile services at the scale required.  Similarly, the species-level data is uneven, with a lack of representative images or descriptive text to better meet the real-world requirements of a Field Guide.  We also need to check through some of the delivered data in more detail – some of the data we receive appears to be getting truncated along the line.

Never-the-less, given the fifty person-hours available, we are quite happy with this result!

We’d like to acknowledge the ALA for its continuing commitment to aggregating the scientific resources to provide a national view of Australia’s biodiversity, and the RBG Victoria’s FungiMap project, which has contributed much of the data we have harvested for this project.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the webmap, or know more about how we can help you with research programs, data management or spatial information systems, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Challenge: Dynamic Fungi Field Guide appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Hub researchers joined with decision-makers, land managers, NGOs and community organisations in Perth to discuss findings and research collaborations of relevance to Western Australia. Presentations covered a wide range of topics including talks on the most imperilled WA species, the efficacy of safe havens, community engagement for threatened species and the role research partnerships play in informing on-ground actions such as species translocations and reintroductions.

Of particular interest was the talk Elisa Bayraktarov (UQ) on developing a Threatened Species Index for Australia as a method for providing a standard comparative scientific method for understanding the rates of species decline while raising the public profile of our threatened species. The first Index, for threatened bird species, will be launched at the upcoming Ecological Society of Australia Annual Conference in Brisbane in November.

This topic led us into discussions back at Gaia HQ as to how publicly-available data can be assembled to show the stories of threatened species, as well as the processes that are potentially contributing to their decline. We set two of our spatial team the task of developing within four days a time series web map to illustrate key data elements for one of Australia’s top 20 mammals most at risk of extinction – Leadbeater’s Possum (Gymnobelideus leadbeateri), and the results are pretty powerful (click on the image to open the web map in a new window):

In just four days, Barbara and Jake created the web map with the following spatial layers:

1. Possum observations: 1179 unrestricted, publicly available points from 1950 to 2018, from Victorian Biodiversity Atlas fauna records.
   In the timeline we set these points to display only for the length of the year they were made. The complete set of observations is available to display in the layer control on the top right;  
2. Parks and reserves boundaries: 350 polygons from 1919 to 2018, from Collaborative Australian Protected Areas Database (CAPAD) 2016 and filtered to show only conservation and national parks and reserves,
3. Logging coupes for Mountain Ash: 4148 polygons from 1960 to 2017, from Spatial Datamart Victoria.
   In the timeline we set these polygons to display for the length of twenty years on the simplistic assumption that subsequent regrowth could again provide possum habitat after that length of time. Actual land use is included only by visual inspection of the recent satellite imagery made available as an alternative base layer.
4. Logging exclusion zones: 1028 polygons from 2014 to 2018, from Spatial Datamart Victoria,
5. Black Saturday fire extent: 87 polygons from the 2009 event, from Spatial Datamart Victoria,
6. Cartographic base layer sourced from CartoDB and satellite imagery from ESRI World Imagery,
7. Significant events text: primarily sourced from Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum fact page.

The web mapping application is built with Leaflet and multiple plugins were incorporated to create a timeline slider, minimap reference locator, and legend.   The following image is a zoomed extent to a northern population of Leadbeater’s Possum displaying content from all these spatial layers.  To be honest, the data wrangling took more time than building the web map (which is all using open source software and plugins!).

Try out the live web map yourself – we’d really be interested in your feedback!  Of course, this is not a scientifically robust model but rather an example of what can be assembled to graphically illustrate a range of events that together can tell stories about threatened species survival in the face of threatening processes, and the ongoing actions to help conserve the species.

The main challenges in this exercise were:

• locating relevant datasets for a species we were not familiar with,
• acquiring Victorian datasets and deciding which ones were most suitable,
• deciding which events had the most impact to display on the web map  timeline,
• understanding the major threats and portraying them on the web map,
• converting shapefiles into formats suitable for web mapping,
• building a visually pleasing and informative web map,
• the timeline slider can only handle so much data and will slow down significantly if too much is added. For example we originally intended to add all available fire history for the study area, however, we found that attempting to visualise c.9000 polygons from 1928-2018 made the timeline slider unusable,
• preparing the data for inclusion in the timeline slider was tedious – considerable geometry simplification and attribute editing were necessary to export timeline ready data.

Nevertheless, we consider this style of spatial visualisation a useful method for presenting data and developing compelling conservation stories for researchers and the community.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the webmap, or know more about how we can help you with research programs, data management or spatial information systems, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Threatened species – mapping stories appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The State NRM Office are a part of the State government Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) and are involved in coordinating, funding and reporting on NRM efforts in the State. A big part of that is their provision of the Community Stewardship Grants round released in mid 2018. Their existing grant software – while powerful in its own right – did not allow applicants to specify where they were going to be doing particular proposed activities “on the ground”. A whole range of questions could begin to be answered with this data, to do with geographic distribution of activities by type, alignment with regional strategies, and program effectiveness.

As an existing GRID customer, the State NRM office saw the potential in the web mapping product to help them catalog these proposed activities and to assess and track grant applications from organisations spread all over the State. However, they needed something that would be simple to use with no training required, and guide them smoothly through the steps of their application. GRID with its rich functionality and different modules just wasn’t going to work as an entry point for applicants new to the world of geospatial software. While GRID is great for a range of NRM activities, we were looking here at applicants who initially had one task they needed to achieve. If you think about the experience you get when you use a (good) in-car navigation or banking app, that’s the kind of experience we were going for where there are minimal mouse clicks and buttons involved – as outlined in the accompanying video we made to help grant applicants.

Our team for the project, including one of our Technical Leads, Tony Prior, along with fellow software engineer James Patrick and yours truly, were all convinced that there was a good fit between the grant application process and GRID. Something more tailored and targeted to the grant process was needed; at the end of the day the data it would generate is also of importance for State NRM office business processes.

So, we designed and implemented a RESTful API (Application Interface) as an enhancement to GRID. This gives us a means of exchanging data  between GRID and a separate web application that we developed, called GRID Grants. GRID Grants provides a step-by-step workflow to define proposed on-ground and capability activities like fencing, weed control, and community events. The State NRM office is able to control several aspects of the GRID Grants content through GRID itself. As shown in the video above, applicants can search for a location, specify a number of activities, draw specific features on a map view and enter other relevant data.

The RESTful API opens the door for future similar projects where GRID integration is required.  It’s also a mobile responsive tool written in Angular, which shows how we can leverage the best frameworks for the solutions that we offer.

We didn’t only just deliver a technical solution, though – we wanted to make sure that it worked for our audience before we released it! We do adopt an Agile methodology to software development where it works for our clients and their projects, and this enables client feedback to be taken into consideration during the development of a product. This provided real benefit during the GRID Grants development – we had the opportunity to have a second crack at our “less than ideal” first version.  The first time around made sense to those familiar with data entry products, but not to the general public. Through consultation with the client and testing – with real applicants! – we were able to flesh-out an alternative user experience design that ‘clicked’ for people of varying technical backgrounds. With this change, our testers suddenly understood the link between features on the map and the information they needed to associate with that feature.

So along the way in the project, we also did some swift pivots to help the client with issues other than just delivering a technical solution. We also developed the YouTube help video above, which the State NRM Office really appreciated when the grant round opened and some 150 applicants suddenly started using the system.  We also provided additional phone and email support for the applicants when half the State NRM office got sick in the final days of the application round!

We’ve had some great feedback directly from applicants, and we are looking forward to the next phase of work with the State NRM Office to help with even smoother and easier tracking of the approved projects and reporting.  Working with the NRM industry is very close to our core mission of enabling our clients to make the positive changes to the environment they look after, and so this is a great opportunity to support the industry even more.

If GRID, or GRID Grants, look like solutions that your organisation could use for managing your spatial data, feel free to reach out and start a conversation with either Tony or myself. We can contacted by email, or feel free to kick off a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

The post StateNRM takes GRID to the next level with GRID Grants appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Of course, I now work for a different sort of company (we also tend to work with a lot of bearded folk); but being based in Perth and Brisbane, we do a lot of work with the resources sector. One of things I love about Gaia Resources is our “core work” test, where we look at the proposal or work opportunity in front of us, and decide whether there is a positive environmental outcome. It’s not always about whether the client’s business is environmental – such is the case with our Natural Resource Management (NRM) and conservation clients – but it’s also about helping all companies achieve better environmental practice and we can facilitate that through a focus on systems, spatial technology and sound information management practices.

Hence… “greener rocks” as the title of this blog.

Recently, one of our mining clients came to us hoping we could help them with their GIS data, software and processes (covering off on many of the things we discussed in a blog back in May). They have been going through significant growth in the past few years on the back of acquisitions, mergers and increases (also read: stability) in those “hard-rock” commodity prices, and we were asked to contribute to improving their environmental compliance processes. After a review of the relevant legislation around the country, we are currently helping them set up Phase 1 of a comprehensive system in support of ground disturbance, rehabilitation and reporting (such as for the Mine Rehabilitation Fund, which we’ve continued to keep an eye on for a while, like this blog covers).

Good environmental management starts with good data management

The first phase is all about using existing technology and resources (i.e. minimal investment) to get a clear handle on what needs to be done, by whom, when and how. Existing spatial software (e.g. QGIS) and other web interfaces pull their data from a single point-of-truth database (in this instance, PostGIS) which contains automatically updated government datasets. Meanwhile, processes and technical documents will help staff understand the role they play in the flow of this critical disturbance and rehab data. The company is determined to manage its information more accurately, and not just to be compliant for the environmental regulator, but also because it makes good financial sense. In a way, they are putting a value on the environment as it relates to their assets, and investing in sound management practices. This is precisely the sort of outcome we aimed to achieve when we took on the work, and it really fits in with our core business test.

The cyclical nature of the resources sector has a massive impact on company’s ability to effectively manage their information over time. What we notice is that when a company is in growth and hiring new staff, it does not necessarily plan for the corresponding investment in information management to cope with that change. When acquisitions and mergers happen, a challenge comes up around what to do with multiple stores of data, processes and systems. This can lead to a tendency for a more reactionary approach, while the progressive forward-thinking companies are able to lift their heads above the weeds and recognise that a relatively small investment can return large dividends in efficiency and better decisions.

That’s a challenge we really like to take on and work with companies to solve.  If you’d like to talk to us about how we could help your organisation with this, drop me a line via email at chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

* Editor’s note: There is probably a picture of Chris somewhere that is aging appropriately, because he isn’t.

The post Greener rocks… appeared first on Gaia Resources.

BCCVL Species Modelling Workshop (Alex)

On July 19 Jake and I attended a workshop on ‘Innovative tools for mapping and modelling species distributions‘ at Curtin University.

Drs Sarah Richmond and Chantal Huijbers from the BCCVL at Griffith Uni presented a workshop for c. 20 participants. By extracting species occurrence data from the spatial portal of Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and importing it into the BCCVL we were able to:

1. understand the need for careful selection and ‘cleaning’ of the spatial data
2. submit the cleaned dataset to various ecological models, including developing predicted species distribution models (see Figure 1), and then
3. analyse these putative distribution models under various future climate change scenarios.

This was all done within the BCCVL’s online portal, shown below.

A predicted species distribution model in the BCCVL.

The BCCVL presents complex spatial data layers, modelling concepts and algorithms in a very usable web portal. It does not, of course, remove the need for users to understand the limitations of the available data or the applicability of models and algorithms.  A more advanced modelling environment – the EcoScience Research Data Cloud and Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory (EcoCloud) was also announced and will be available shortly.

We were very interested in some of the ways that data was presented, and the tools that the BCCVL were making openly available – they seem to be things that we could potentially use in our own work, or we can recommend to our clients.

Perth EcoScience Pathways Forum (Andrew)

The following day I attended another BCCVL led event: the ‘Perth EcoScience Pathways Forum’ at the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. This event aimed to provide an opportunity to learn more about existing digital infrastructure,  training and skills development programs for environmental science, and it also showcases research and exemplar users of digital technologies.  A big part of this is that it also aims to ignite discussions around common issues and practices.

The earlier part of the day focused on some of the interesting research happening in this space, it was great to see our BioSys and Climatewatch projects getting a mention at various points. A few of the highlights for me from the morning session were:

• Paul Gioia talking about BioSys and the recent work we have done on a new mobile tool (more to come on that in a future project summary),
• A demo of the soon to be released EcoCloud system, and
• Dr Nicki Mitchell from UWA discussing how they have been using Climatewatch as a data collection and analysis tool for their first year biology students
  

In the afternoon the focus shifted from research to discussing issues and challenges attendees were having in their day to day work. There were a number of interesting issues discussed but the one that really peaked my interest was related to fire data. A number of people in my group were frustrated that they weren’t able to see all relevant fire scar data in one place, but also that they weren’t confident in the fire scar boundaries –  they found it difficult and time consuming to ground truth them using aerial imagery.  I’m always keen to hear about problems like these because solving problems is exactly what we do here at Gaia Resources.

Once I got back from the forum I asked Jake if he could take a look at the fire scar data and see if he could put something together as a proof of concept for how this task could be completed more efficiently.

Fire Scar Data (Jake)

Andrew’s already set the scene for what he asked me to do – a way of looking at some relevant imagery, and fire scar data, to make it really easy for people to ground truth those areas.

I chose to implement this using a web-based leaflet map, and to show a side-by-side comparison of the data from NAFI (Northern Australian Fire Information) current fire scars (for 2018, at least) and overlay that with the most up-to-date Sentinel imagery. The area displayed on the map clearly shows recent fire scars and if you drag the middle toggle across you will be able to see evidence of this on the Sentinel satellite imagery.

NAFI fire scars are mapped using images from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument carried by NASA’s Terra satellite. These images have a resolution of 250m as you can probably examine if you zoom into the edges of a fire scar boundary, where they appear blocky and pixellated.

Using the NAFI and Sentinel web services makes it really easy to display relevant data quickly and without the hassle of downloading large datasets and pre-processing data, but the downsides to this workflow are lower resolution results and not being able to analyse the data in an in-depth way – something you’d do in a desktop spatial package, like QGIS (and I have to give a plug for our free online QGIS training course).

If you would like to know anymore about how we set up this sort of web map, data sourcing, or anything else, feel free to get in touch via our emails below, leave a comment, or start a conversation with us on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Alex, Andrew and Jake

The post BCCVL Workshops appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Charlie and Mary came to us back in 2014 and we started to put together the Corals of the World website – www.coralsoftheworld.org.  Initially we went down the Drupal path for this project, but it became apparent that a more customizable technology would be required to fully realize the features our clients required. For this we developed a fully bespoke solution using the Django Web Framework, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – more on that to come.

The beta site launched in 2017 – with Coral ID and Coral Geographic up and running!

In the early phases of the project we did some initial scoping and requirement gathering. However, after a lot of skype calls and email discussion it became apparent that a visit to Townsville to meet Charlie and Mary in person was necessary to fully flesh out the project. This is one of the areas we really pride ourselves on – getting to know the client, their needs and working with them collaboratively – and in person wherever possible.  In this economic climate where a lot of consultancies are outsourcing and offshoring their work, this is fast becoming a competitive advantage.

Back to the site – the site itself is rich in information about not only coral species but also in linking how they have been and continue to be impacted by environmental changes. This gave rise to a robust versioning system whereby all of the data that underlies the site is tagged with under a version which gives rise to the ability to be able to select a historical version of the site (e.g. version 1.00) and have all the data shown as it was at that time.For a site that is built on taxonomy, this is a big deal, as it means you can go and view the state of knowledge on coral taxonomy at any of these versions – and it’s something I’ve not seen attempted before (most just present the “as we know it now” view, and you have to dig back to find the history).   

I’m really tempted to segue into a discussion about taxonomy and how it works – but then I just remembered that I’ve done that quite recently, in my “What do I want from taxonomy” blog I wrote in September, so I’ll curtail my tendencies to wax lyrical here.

The Corals of the World site has information on (at version 1.00) 831 species of Corals, and in many ways it reflects the digitisation of a lot of Charlie and Mary’s work – including the Corals of the World books, the Coral Geographic project, and the Coral ID CD-ROM.  A lifetime of work in this area (read Charlie’s recent biography “A Life Underwater” – I highly recommend it) means that Charlie and Mary have a huge amount of data on coral species, and our project is to make this available to a global audience.  Making this data available is a responsibility that we don’t take lightly.

Charlie and Mary are independent researchers – their work is not funded by government, or by any one institution.  So this represents a challenge for us as a service provider – working with an extremely limited budget, that is topped up with small grants as they can be obtained (or from whatever donations come in via the site).  While it’s difficult to work on such a large project with such a limited budget, it’s also an opportunity to help where we can, and this helps us to achieve one of our core goals at Gaia Resources of supporting conservation and research.

With this in mind, we’re always looking for opportunities to reduce costs and still provide functionality and new features.  One of those strategies was to move to the AWS platform, and it’s provided considerable robustness and low cost that we could simply not deliver in any other manner, especially when you consider the amount of data (hundreds of GB) and the different functionality (image serving, database queries, mapping functionality and more to come).  As an indication of how well AWS performs, we can spin up staging servers when we’ve got a new version ready to deploy to allow Mary and the team can test it without impacting on the production site – and then we shut it down once the changes make production, saving considerable costs on running multiple instances in parallel for longer periods of time.  It’s definitely worthy of a success story for AWS, and that’s something that we’ll put in place in due course (we’re also finalising our partnership at the moment with them).

The detail of the species data within the site is very in depth

We have been working for several years with Mary and Charlie on the site, from the first designs that Mary provided through to the launch in 2017 for feedback, and to show to potential funding partners what can be done.  There is so much more in the pipeline – we have many documents and designs from Mary to work through in the future – so while our work is dependent upon more funding and more time, there is a surfeit of passion behind it!

On a very personal note; this is one of the projects that I would like to see as part of the successful legacy of Gaia Resources.  So, throughout 2018 it will be one of our projects that we will continue to partner and work with Charlie and Mary on into the future, and make sure that this wealth of knowledge, and ongoing scientific research, not to mention the corals themselves, remains available for the future.

Piers

The post Corals of the World appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our little display at the event

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

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

An audience that was very interested in open data 

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

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

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

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

Morgan

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

The post Open data and innovation in Queensland appeared first on Gaia Resources.