Gaia Resources recently had the opportunity to support some UWA PhD research through the donation of the use of a ruggedisd PDA to conduct field data collection in the south west near Walpole.

Nicolas Faivre is currently researching the influence of fire on biodiversity in a number of different areas throughout the world or in his words:

“The PhD project is addressing the question of how pyrodiversity (i.e. spatiotemporal variability of fire attributes) influences multi-scale biodiversity of Mediterranean landscapes. The objective of the work is to improve our understanding of fire regimes at an operational level to determine how best to utilize fire for maintaining biodiversity in threatened hotspot areas.”

Nicolas in action in the field collecting data

The comparison between European and Australian Mediterranean ecosystems on key issues concerning fire management at the landscape level has never been undertaken before and the expected results will be of international interest.

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On Tuesday 23rd February, I went to Curtin University to present the fourth annual Gaia Resources scholarship.

This scholarship is awarded to the student with the highest tertiary entrance score entering the GIS course at the Department of Spatial Sciences. This year, the winner is Sean Gilmore – which we’ve announced on our twitter and news feeds already. Here’s the obligatory handshake photo:

I started the scholarship very early on in Gaia Resources’ history, in our second year. It came about because of a chat I had with Bert Veenendaal, the head of the Department of Spatial Sciences. I’ve sat on a few committees with Bert over the years (AURISA, the precursor to SSI which then became SSSI), and he and I were discussing the lack of GIS graduates. It seems that there just wasn’t people being attracted to the degree program, so this scholarship was my way of helping out there. There was also a Woodside award made at the same time – which also hopefully helps attract GIS students into the profession. Despite these awards, there still seems to be a bit of a shortage of GIS graduates in Perth (and Curtin students still enjoy a 100% employment rate from their GIS course).

The second part of my afternoon was spent helping AJ and Ben (K) deliver a presentation to the software engineering students in the Department of Computing. This is a new venture for us, but basically the students are looking for real world projects to participate in for their third/fourth year project. A whole range of companies participate, and you go in with an idea, present it to the students, and they vote on which they want to be involved in. I think ours was of interest to them – I won’t steal AJ’s thunder by saying anything more about it, but you can expect us to say more about it in the future – so hopefully we’ll be partnering with a few students to do a project soon.

University was – and continues to be – a big part of my life. I’m a serial graduate, and I’m now working on another postgraduate qualification. This is an Energy Studies graduate program from Murdoch University. As you would have seen in other posts, we’re pretty interested in renewable energy here, and when I found the Murdoch course I jumped at the chance to learn a bit more about it. And as an external student, I’ve downloaded all the lectures and course notes ready for my next plane trip east… which is tomorrow (yes, our flights are carbon offset – though I prefer to minimize them if I can!).

So here's to learning!

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When I look through our historical work, Gaia Resources has been involved in citizen science – specifically in the area of “biological” citizen science – for some time.  In 2008, we started the development of the Climatewatch web site with Earthwatch Australia, and I was asked to be involved in their project technical committee.  In 2009, Gaia Resources began our participation with the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), where we reviewed the landscape of citizen science in Australia, and identified some great examples of citizen science, both in Australia and beyond.

One of the things that does concern a lot of people (notably professionals) about citizen science is the quality of the records that are produced.  I’ve been brought up as a citizen scientist (“bird nerd” is the term I prefer) from an early age, and I know the quality of my own records - I’m no expert.  However, I think that when you can get lots of data from citizen scientists, the mass of data will show trends that are significant.  It’s crowd sourcing science, which I think in itself is a good thing (we always need more scientists, right?).  If you use these records as a supplementary data source to be used in conjunction with verified, professional (vouchered) records, then I think this is a sensible approach with a lot of value in it.

I personally have been involved in the other end of citizen science for several years.  Some people might have seen my old Digital Birding Database, containing my own personal bird records.  Apart from that, I also volunteer my time to help Rio Tinto run their Birdwatch event.  At these events, a group of “experts” (a term that I protest about) take staff from Rio Tinto and their families on bird walks in different areas.  On these trips, I’ve been to Karratha Station, Hamersley Station and this year, Herdsman Lake.  It’s a very rewarding experience for me to see people from different backgrounds get interested in these activities, and I know that the data and reports I write up go to some important research through Birdlife International.

In 2010, Gaia Resources is continuing to work in the citizen science space.  We will be working with the ALA on a ‘Citizen Science Portal’.  The aim of this project is to develop a comprehensive web portal that will allow groups of all sizes to record and manage data collected from citizen science activities.  We’re considering a lot of things – where these applications can be hosted, how to make them easier to use, what sort of modules are required, and what sort of technologies are going to give us the best long-term sustainability for these tools.

One part of this work (and my reason for recent travel to Melbourne) is developing a mobile interface to the citizen science tools in conjunction with Museum Victoria, aimed at school students.  This work, sponsored by the Victorian government, fitted in with the ALA’s vision so well, we brought the two projects together.  So while we develop the mobile software, Museum Victoria staff can focus on developing the supporting materials.  This project will also mesh into the main application – so that in September, we’ll have an application that can also deliver mobile tools for people to use.

Of course, if you’ve read our blog or know about us, you’d know we’re into the open source area quite heavily.  The ALA is intending for all of this software to be made available through an open source framework – where we hope that we can get other developers interested in it over time, and watch it develop.

I see a lot of potential in the citizen science space to make a positive difference on the world we live in.  It seems like just about every day I get another link from someone saying “check out this citizen science application”, and they’re all better than the last.  There’s an amazing increase in the amount of citizen science projects out there.  We might just be able to provide a toolkit that they can all use – saving each from building their own, and meaning more of their funding can focus on education, data capture and other activities – preventing duplication in software building.

It’s like the proposal I’ve been shopping around Museums for some time.  If each has their own system for collections management, how much collectively is the Museum sector spending on software?  In an area that is short on funding, couldn’t we spend that money better on digitizing collections rather than software licences?  I hope that we can help avoid this in the citizen science space – and who knows, much of the functionality we are building into the citizen science portal is very similar to what’s needed for collections management, so there might be more to say on this in the future, as well.

Keep an eye out for more information on our citizen science work through the ALA main web site, and through their newsletters.  Or, if you want to know more, contact me either through email or follow me on Twitter.