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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris

The post Recap on the Territory NRM conference appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Hosted by the Indigenous Carbon Industry Network (ICIN) on Larrakia country at Charles Darwin University, fire managers, indigenous land managers, carbon industry practitioners, scientists and policy-makers from across Australia meet to reflect, connect and share knowledge about savanna fire management.

Members gather for the inaugural Indigenous Carbon Industry Network Meeting at the North Australian Savanna Fire Forum in February 2019. Photo courtesy ICIN.

This is my second time attending the Forum and it’s a great opportunity to meet people in the industry, including fire ranger groups, government staff at Environment and Primary Industry departments, NRM groups, Commonwealth environmental regulators and Not-for-profit organisations as well as researchers, pastoralists and Carbon Farming consultants.

I’m looking forward to hearing about how ranger groups and traditional owners are proactively managing their land, conserving biodiversity and reducing Australia’s carbon footprint through early-season burning. These ‘world-leading’ Indigenous Land Management practices in Northern Australia provide opportunities to learn and share knowledge across jurisdictions, especially in light of the bushfire crisis in southern parts of Australia.

For example, the North Australian and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI)’s innovative fire map infographics and fire history videos provide historical context to Savanna fire management activities.

I’m also interested in hearing more about the relationship between fire severity, feral animals and small mammals in savanna landscapes. I’ll be taking lots of notes over these two days, and I’ll follow up with a review of the Forum in next week’s blog post.

PS. We’re running 1-day QGIS training courses straight after the Forum, on Thursday 20th and Friday 21st February 2020, 8:30 – 16:30 ACST at the Darwin Innovation Hub. There are a few spaces left, and you can find all the details on our Event page, or contact me directly via chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

If you’d like to know more about particular projects or talks presented at the Forum, you can leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me, as above.

Chris

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

She Codes cupcakes

Tracey, one of our environmental scientists and support specialist writes “She Codes was a great experience overall. I have been learning the basics of Python coding online, but the tutorials were quite dry and heavy on information. In the She Codes workshop we used a practical exercise that was both informative and fun – coding a basic video game where you guide a turtle around a screen chomping on ‘space cabbages’. Having something fun and engaging really made the learning curve less daunting and kept my focus, and each module felt rewarding as my turtle gained new abilities.”

Barbara, one of our spatial analysts said “There was a good choice of subjects – WordPress, Django, Python and HTML with CSS – and plenty of mentors to help out with problems or just to talk to. Each had a badge with their field of expertise so it was easy to find answers. I also have to mention the famous cupcakes – they were delicious ;)”

She Codes founder Kate Kirwin says “This initiative has truly created a space for women to be welcomed into the tech industry, and I’m more than pleased to announce that 40% of the women who were part of the 2019 pilot program have now secured new roles within tech”. With a combination of in-person and virtual mentoring, She Codes Plus provides successful participants with the essentials required to pursue careers in technology-focused roles. Conducted on a part-time basis, participants undertake four unique projects focussed on building web applications using the HTML/CSS, Python, Django and React.

She Codes coders in Saturdays workshop (photo courtesy of She Codes)

In our Brisbane office, Sophie and Megan attended the Brisbane PyLadies chapter last week. PyLadies is a mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Their mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings. PyLadies also aims to provide a friendly support network for women and a bridge to the larger Python world.

Sophie reports that “Megan and I braved last Thursday’s meeting despite pouring rain – we were both a bit damp, but enthusiastic! We heard Toni Sefton speak on her personal experience getting into coding and Python using a less-than-direct path. She was open about the challenges in overcoming her own doubts; being willing to take a risk on this change in direction in her life despite feeling that she still had too much to learn. One of the key factors in helping her to develop her own skills was having a supportive mentor. This helped to also remind me of the importance of providing that support and encouragement when friends and colleagues show an interest in expanding their knowledge and skills in the future.

Then Bertrand Caron spoke about different approaches to writing modern Python code. While a lot of it was beyond my skill level, he helpfully provided his slides for future reference, and I am sure I will be looking back on these with interest once my skills allow it! It was great to see part of the supportive and motivated coding community learning together.”

Our team are looking out for more opportunities like this to participate and learn, so if you know of other great initiatives like She Codes or PyLadies, then please feel free leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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After our WA Chief Scientist, Peter Klinken, launched the event (with a great display of his understanding of the Noongar language!) we heard about the WA Data Science Innovation Hub from Liz Dallimore. Based at Curtin Uni, this new Innovation Hub aims to enable data science capabilities to flourish in WA, for “jobs and growth”.

The two presentations after that came from Greg Terrill, Chief Data Officer at the federal Department of Energy and Environment (DEE) Environmental Resources Information Network (ERIN), and from Matt Judkins, a partner at Deloitte.  These two really got me thinking…

One of the slides that Greg presented was on his five big things he wanted to see happen:

These were (and hopefully I got these right, as it’s hard to take notes while standing):

• Self-service – empowering people to be able to find out more information about biodiversity much more easily,
• Standards – making sure that the various biodiversity projects could be interoperable,
• Historical information – a key baseline to start from to do things like detect change in environments,
• Economics drivers – looking at how many indices are out there for predicting the economy, so where are the biodiversity and environmental predictors?, and
• Artificial intelligence/machine learning – a key to unlocking more information, and to identify patterns and the like from existing data.

These were really good points to raise, and ones that I’d been discussing earlier in the week with a group of stakeholders around the concept of a new Biodiversity Information Office for Western Australia (more on that some other time).  I also got the chance to talk to Greg and his team a little during the week about some of the analytical work we’ve been doing, like our historical Leadbetter’s possum R&D project (see the image below, and click on it for an interactive map).

Matt’s talk was interesting and from a really different point of view.  His talk outlined the fact that you needed to talk about metrics on biodiversity in ways that the decision makers will understand, which usually means dollar values.  Of course, that does cause some tension straight away, as it is often a struggle to put a dollar value on the conservation of areas, or the provision of natural spaces, and other areas.  But if you are facing a stakeholder audience that is driven by dollars, then you need to find ways to convert the environmental factors to that measure – which is often very difficult to do!

One of the things I’ve been thinking through over the years is about somehow codifying the value of biodiversity through the value of the data that you have collected.  Data that is used within a biodiversity survey (e.g. a fauna and flora combined survey) costs a lot of money to collect, when you consider the mobilisation of field teams, the expertise that you need to have on hand (e.g. for the specimen identification) and other costs.  So perhaps one day, data will be able to be put onto an accounting balance sheet, and maybe even depreciated over time.

It was really interesting – and timely – to talk about big data and biodiversity with such a diverse group of people.  At Gaia Resources, we’re always looking for the next challenge and the evolutionary path we need to follow, and big data, analytics and even machine learning are all things that we’ve been looking at for some time.

It won’t be long until we are using many of Greg’s five areas on a daily basis, at least in the areas of environmental technology.  I can’t wait – it feels like it’s about time!

Piers

The post Big Data and Biodiversity appeared first on Gaia Resources.

As part of this approach, we provided two main tools to the attendees:

• A “self assessment” Excel worksheet which looks at an organisation’s capabilities, and provides some guidance into what you could look for in terms of a road map, and
• A simple Excel template that is a simple way of implementing the Australian Series System, as guided by the “Describing Archives in Context: A Guide to Australasian Practice” publication from the ASA.

We hope that this really does meet some of the needs of the community and those involved in the workshop – if you want to know more then feel free to contact either myself, James or Kerry to ask us any questions you might have.  Stay tuned for a proper wrap up of the conference in the coming week – or otherwise, take a peek at the #asa2018 hashtag.

Piers

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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

The post Symposium on Flora and Vegetation Surveys appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Wifi at 30,000ft?

Last week I headed to Canberra for the Fenner Conference on the Environment: Urban Sustainability and Conservation, primarily to meet up with some of the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub team and to participate in the conference (which was not your usual conference, more on that in a second).  My technology musings started at about 15 minutes after takeoff from Perth… when the cabin crew announced there is new, “high-speed” Wi-fi on domestic flights.  My first reaction was that there goes my little happy place of solitude at 30,000ft, but I was also pretty impressed that it was available.

The Fenner conference, held at the Shine Dome in Canberra, was an event I’m really glad I attended.  There were some thought-provoking presentations around landscape and building design and the environment, replacing trees with artificial ones, mygalamorph spiders in Perth, and unintended consequences of human-nature interactions (like urban wetlands for water treatment being new breeding grounds for mosquitoes).  It was also great to see Landcare represented (through the Corowa District Landcare group).

Apart from the talks, there was a considerable part of the day set aside for discussions towards how a statement around urban sustainability and conservation could be embraced, and in the afternoon session there was an interesting discussion around keeping us talking after the conference.  Immediately, everyone started suggesting forums, list servers, Facebook groups and the like, and I decided to pipe up.

My take on this comes from our work in citizen science, where it is really important to have engagement that is meaningful and preferably personal.  Alex has done a great job of presenting about that citizen science aspect in a couple of recent blogs, too.  Those forums and the like that were suggested above don’t work well for me, because they don’t deliver the same meaningful discussion we were having in the room.  So I suggested “as the IT guy” that you think about localised informal chapters that meet for coffee (or beer) to carry on these discussions.  There is yet to be a technology in the world is not a substitute for quality human interaction (especially when helped along with a beverage)!

Shiny dome at the Shine Dome (I couldn’t resist

I also spend quite a bit of time talking to a range of our clients in Canberra, including CSIRO, where we’re on the final stretch of our “upskilling” Collections Management project with the team behind the National Research Collections of Australia (NRCA).  Our project here has been to work alongside the CSIRO team, providing expertise, support and advice on the implementation of CollectiveAccess into the NRCA collections (more on that to come in a future blog).  A lot of that project has involved using technology to communicate – Confluence for tracking discussions and knowledge, Jira for tracking tasks, and a bunch of teleconferencing and videoconferencing to ensure that communication is as good as we can do remotely.  So technology was helping us communicate remotely, but wasn’t a complete substitute (we couldn’t just rely on Confluence and Jira).

I also managed across my travels to maintain something of a presence back in our offices, by being available to get into our team videoconferences, responding to emails, and working on a range of project deliverables while I was on the road.  Thank goodness for technology – on the way home I even used the in-flight wifi a bit (and to be honest, it’s still got teething problems) to catch up and try to clear the deck for the weekend.

Road warriors are powered by caffeine as much as technology

So I got home and recovered during the weekend (my fitness sure needs some work, but thankfully our new digs at FLUX have a gym) before heading straight back out to present yesterday at the Perth NRM Using Digital Technology in Natural Resource Management workshop.  I headed up the workshop with an introduction to technologies, providing some of our insights from working in this space for the last 15 years at Gaia Resources.  My slide deck is going out to the attendees as a PDF (which you can get here), and is embedded below.

The key messages from this presentation really riffed off the last week:

• Technology is not a magic bullet (and certainly doesn’t replace human interaction),
• Technology changes over time,
• Technology is no substitute for engagement, and
• Think about data standards, maintenance and collaboration.

It was a very interesting week all up which had me on something of a roller coaster ride, but it also has left me even more convinced that appropriate technology can help deliver great outcomes to the environment.  Seeing how well we can work remotely and how different technologies can help our clients to deliver on their needs, was a real refresher – something that kept me going through the pretty long days you get when you’re on the road (and catching up afterwards).

Technology for it’s own sake is not a good thing; but when you pair up a particular problem with appropriate technology? Well, that’s what gets me up and grinning every morning here at Gaia Resources, and we’re always looking for ways to help our clients – so drop me a line, or start a conversation with our team via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Behind the scenes: Travels with Technology appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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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The Citizen Science Forum was a great event, run throughout the morning at the Queensland Museum (a place I’ve been to many times in former roles with the Faunal Collections Informatics Group, representing the Western Australian Museum).  There were seven speakers crammed into the schedule (myself included), covering a range of topics that were closely related.

First up, after the formalities and introductions from Suzanne Miller and Jayne Keane from the Queensland Museum, Jessie Cappadonna gave us an overview of the Australian Citizen Science Association, and their progress to date in setting up and starting to really formalise the organisation.  Gaia Resources has been supporting ACSA since their inception with our ongoing free hosting of their web site and supporting their other technology needs, and it was great to get an update from them.  There’s been a lot of work behind the scenes from the volunteer committee.

The speakers getting ready for the Q&A session (picture from ACSA’s twitter account)

Then it was straight into the main series of presentations and Q&A time – it’s hard to do all the presenters pictured justice from their talks, so you can have a look at the ACSA’s twitter feed  for some highlights, and my presentation is included below as a PDF and Slideshare embed.

The Q&A session was pretty interesting, there were some interesting questions posed to us – one in particular was about the high cost of apps.  My response was that yes, apps can be expensive, but they can be quite complex and need other infrastructure such as web sites and databases to support them.  So if you are thinking of doing an app, collaborate with like minded people – like we facilitated with the Kangaroo Island / Victor Harbour Dolphin Watch, where we suggested that they save their funds and instead use the freely available Coastal Walkabout apps.  We also gave them some additional support by loading their historical data, provided them with a project page on our Citizen Science Hub, and we are continuing on supporting the team over in South Australia by providing them data when they need it.

I would note that apps are pretty much useless without some form of engagement around them – the “build it and they will come” mentality is prevalent in app building these days and in our experience, this fails every time.  And hence our involvement in the Communicate to Inspire conference back here in Perth – more on that in a later post.

After the Q&A the workshop finished up, and then I led a smaller delegation of invitees across to a nearby hotel where we could then start to workshop out in more detail the underlying theme of the day; “Mainstreaming Citizen Science in Decision Making”.  Our aim from this follow-up workshop was to capture the people, ideas and enthusiasm from the morning and do something more than leave a series of digital footprints, but to develop a discussion paper or guidelines that could be re-used.  Gaia Resources funded the venue and catering for the event, but the most valuable input was the time of the invitees who came along to the event and freely gave their experience and enthusiasm!

As a result, we had a very interesting series of discussions including recapping the morning, looking at the issues, barriers, and solutions we could identify to mainstreaming citizen science.  Thankfully, I had the talented Jessie Cappadonna and Michelle Neil to help me facilitate this session and to bring out the themes that were apparent from our discussions.  I took a lot of post it notes home with me and as a result of that put together a word cloud so that you can see what we discussed…

A cloud of citizen science words… soon to be a discussion paper

I am working on the discussion paper already, which will then be circulated to all of the invitees who attended to assist with writing and publishing it.  It will be a great experiment in collective work but I feel that with these people involved it will be a very useful end product.

Citizen science continues to be something that interests and excites me personally, I’m still out there every weekend, still not seeing many dolphins in the Swan River.  Even as I was writing this blog I received several more mole cricket sightings from the public (see previous blogs here) – something I’ve not been actively promoting or working on for some time!  So it still captures the imagination of people and can have a long legacy, too.  So keep an eye on our Citizen Science Hub for more information on our projects and initiatives.

Stay tuned for more on the discussion paper, and for a couple of new citizen science projects coming up!

Piers

Leave me a comment below, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post Citizen Science in Brisbane appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Last week, Benny and I had the opportunity to work pretty closely with one of our clients, Peter Neville from the Department of Health.  We were locked up in a room for a week (well, to be more accurate, I flitted in and out but based myself in there for a large part of the week) and worked primarily on a single project.  My role in Gaia Resources as the Director means that it’s very unusual to have more than an hour on a single task before I get pulled off it to something else (either by a colleague or a client), so having a primary focus for a few days on a single thing was both refreshing and challenging.

Benny and Pete deep in the detail of a task

We’ve done this a few times before, as Benny wrote about back in 2012 when we had Ben Richardson from the WA Herbarium in to work on the image management application we wrote for them.  We’ve also recently done it on another project, which had our client flying in from the east coast for a week, and again for a large grant proposal we were working on, where again, our client (or in this case, potential client) flew over to spend time with us in our Leederville office.

Working on one project with a client right there, giving you immediate feedback, can be a rare thing in the software engineering game; you might be seeing them for sprint demonstrations and planning every two weeks (if you use Agile methods), or even over longer time periods if you use Waterfall-style methods.  So to have that immediate feedback is both a challenge and a blessing – it is easy for you all to get distracted off down the rabbit hole but it’s also great to see a lot of smaller things get knocked off immediately.

So, what did we learn from this?  Well, working right next to someone, and having discussions over coffee, lunch and the like all give you an chance to re-calibrate your own view of the project – and to our surprise quite often that was different than our client’s view.  On long term projects, like this one is, this is a danger – but it certainly means that this sort of one-to-one time is highly valuable and it will be something we will be trying to schedule into future project plans.

On a personal level, getting some time to work on a single project reminded me how to be more disciplined, to be more careful about how we communicate (and specifically, to outline our assumptions), and to see if we can repeat these sorts of events again in future projects.  And I also got some independent confirmation that Babylon’s coffee is still by far the best in Leederville!

Here’s hoping we get to see you soon in our office?  Or invite us over to yours!

Piers

Leave a comment below, email me, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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My background in the Pilbara is thanks to Biota Environmental Sciences, which was my last job before starting Gaia Resources eleven years ago.  Working with the team at Biota, I learned much of the craft around ecological and biological surveys, and fell just a little bit in love with the Pilbara.  Ever since then, I’ve been sneaking back up to the Pilbara whenever I can to do things like volunteer birdwatching trips, workshops and to catch up with our clients in that area.

Me, investigating a rock pile in the Pilbara back in 2001

Anyway, enough of memory lane and back to the discussion group workshop for Pilbara Corridors.

The purpose of this third workshop was to review the outputs from Workshop Two with a group of people that couldn’t make it to the previous Pilbara workshop.  Being at the previous workshops was really beneficial as this gave me an insight into just how much additional knowledge and experience the second workshop contributed – which this began right from the first interactive discussion.

One of the issues raised in this first interactive session was about data and knowledge sharing, something of personal and professional interest to me.  As part of the Pilbara Corridors project, we have been working with the team behind it to try to start capturing information on the work being done in the Pilbara, and have a view of this data up on the Pilbara Corridor web site.  With other projects we’ve worked on in the past, such as the work I did for the Pilbara Biological Survey Database, the Rio Tinto Environmental Characteristics and Capabilities project  right through to the recent State Environmental Data Library, this is starting to be a bit of a theme across the whole environmental industry over the past ten years.  I think that the Pilbara Corridors project really has the potential to bring these disparate knowledge management projects together into a form that will be very useful for the future.

The Pilbara Corridor project has an “effort” heat map showing surveys in the Pilbara

It’s always interesting to see how different knowledge bases bring new ideas into play, and there were some good additions to the outcomes from workshop two.  When looking at the broad list of assets that were captured in that previous workshop, the participants added in some interesting new nested assets, and restructured the listing.  This was really valuable to the project as a whole new range of experience was brought into the process.

Reviewing the condition of the various assets that were captured in the second workshop was also beneficial to the project, as we got a range of different opinions again on the condition of these assets, based on additional experience – and got a few more ideas on where to find additional data to support those condition assessments.

Reviewing the threats was a much more difficult process, as there was a lot of work in the previous workshop about pulling together a range of attributes into a single ‘rating’ for each threat against each asset type.  One of the points coming up from this discussion was around the need to quantify the experience and knowledge of people involved – for example, you wouldn’t take my word on the threat of feral bees across the Pilbara, as I’ve got very little experience in this area.  However, there were some great minds in the room providing opportunities to learn from each other, as well as to identify areas for future investigation.

The Conservation Action Planning process in use here really relies on this expertise, and having a range of people being willing able to contribute their time and expertise has been one of the strengths of this project.  The next workshop is coming in late July which covers the ‘rubber hits the road’ component – looking at the actions and steps.  Between now and then, we have some spatial investigations to work through… so stay tuned for another blog at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, leave a comment below, or get in touch via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

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Once again Barry and Todd from Greening Australia facilitated the workshop, along with support from Ian from the Pilbara Corridors project. I played the “map nerd in the corner” role, updating the stakeholders on the work we did between the two workshops, creating draft asset maps and adding some more projects and studies to the mapping portal (you can access this map here).

 The Pilbara Corridors Knowledge Map

The second workshop was where the Conservation Action Planning (CAP) process really started to take shape.

The CAP process is also known as Healthy Country Planning. It was initially developed by The Nature Conservancy, and you can read more about it at the CAP web site.  It’s quite an interesting process in itself, and uses the concept of open source to make the process, the tools and the training of practitioners more widely available. With over 1,000 projects using the CAP process globally, it’s one of the more accepted and successful processes in this arena.

In the first part of the workshop, attendees worked through the assets for the Pilbara. To prepare for the workshop, we had put together some simple datasets, including broad categories of the assets, including coastal assets, open plains, rivers and rocky hills and ranges.  This in itself seemed pretty simple but the devil is in the detail – and we knew these were preliminary categories that would likely change.

In trying to define some of these, like the “rocky hills and ranges” one, we started with Beard’s vegetation complexes. Therein lies a problem, as was echoed at the workshop – this data is just not suitable for the Pilbara. The next step was to move to the Land Systems mapping from DAFWA which has some similar issues.  In the end, we had to grab contour maps to delineate the main Pilbara craton and go with some additional Beard’s complexes.  Although it was only an approximation of the wonderful complexity of the Pilbara, it was a starting point from where we could have further discussions in the workshop.

Defining the extent of natural features is always problemmatic – where’s the edge of the Fortescue Marsh?

One of the key benefits of these workshops is to network and learn from the stakeholders.  So, when one of the participants (thanks, Blair!) came up to offer a better way to identify rocky ranges using a ruggedness model, I was more than happy to take this advice and we should be able to map these features more accurately as a result.

During the workshop, our initial four broad categories of assets were expanded out to 13 different categories. Some will be relatively easy to map; others will need to be looked at in a lot more detail.  The CAP process can also work with the concept of nested assets, i.e. that there are a range of more specific assets under these broader categories.

To prepare for these nested assets, we had captured the extents of the specific assets that were identified in workshop one. We had a lot of interpretation to do from previous notes in order to turn “that spot, you know, near that range, where there is that seepage” into a point on a map. Given our time constraints and the fact that this was a first draft, the team captured polygons where possible, then collapsed them to indicative points at the centroids.

We also brought in the Pilbara assets that were identified from the INFFER-based process that Rangelands NRM ran in order to prioritise their investment for their Regional Plan.  During the workshop, these assets were identified in some more detail by the participants (or new ones were identified) and again, there will need to be some spatial ‘sleuthing’ done here to capture the extents of these assets and to gather more spatial information on them.

Indicative assets from the first two workshops

From here the 13 categories, as well as the nested assets, had their condition and threats evaluated in a workshop environment.  Not only was I frantically trying to take notes, but being able to hear about what’s happening on the Pilbara landscapes from the participants also made me think back to the days when I was doing field work in the Pilbara – and how some of the areas nominated sound like they have changed since then!

The upcoming third workshop is where the work done at this second workshop will be digested and the project will then look at the strategic way forward for these assets – determining conservation goals, strategies, key actions and monitoring.  It will be a very interesting conclusion to the workshop series!

For more information on our work with the Pilbara Corridors project, visit the Pilbara Corridors web site, or feel free to drop us a line on email, Facebook, Twitter or leave a comment below.

Piers

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