Over the years we have developed quite a range of apps in the biodiversity, fire, parks and citizen science sectors.

In the citizen science sector, a number of our apps have helped scientists engage with citizenry to monitor and report sightings of species of interest in order to broaden their research input. Our most long-running partnership is with the River Guardians team in WA’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, where the Dolphin Watch app has enabled the monitoring of the small population of Indo-pacific bottle-nosed dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in Perth’s Swan and Canning River estuary. Over nearly a decade we have put enormous effort into supporting this significant program, where up to 1000 trained local citizens have contributed images, observations and surveys to the project. The project has since been extended to other sites in WA, such as Broome and Mandurah.

Two more recent project to aid species conservation were the I Spy Koala app, developed in 2019 for the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) for the collection of koala observation and survey data to improve the flow of Koala observation data into NSW planning and decisions tools; and Slug Sleuth, , an app that aims to help scientists, locals and visitors to collect observation data for slugs and snails within Mount Kaputar National Park and adjacent Nandewar Ranges within NSW, but especially the threatened Mt Kaputar giant pink slug (Triboniophorus< aff. graeffei).

Significantly, both these apps were developed to submit data to the NPWS BioSys repository. BioSys is an open-source, standards-based data management system built specifically for biological data. The system has a flexible data schema model that allows users to create a schema specific to the structure of their data, and that can apply to just about any biological and ecological data.

The Urban Wildlife app was developed for the NESP Clean Air and Urban Landcapes Hub, based primarily at the University of Melbourne, and contained multiple projects in which to record sightings of bell frogs, beneficial insects, flying foxes, or possums and gliders, usually across all states and territories in Australia.

Another take on the utility of apps – if they can help observe and conserve biodiversity, can they also assist in managing its major threatening processes? Here’s a couple of examples that we’ve brought into production in the last couple of years.

The NAFI Fire Information app brings the most used fire information resource for land managers in northern Australia to a mobile device, providing a constant eye on local bushfire threats.

And, the Essential Service Volunteers app helps volunteers automatically track the duration, location and type of work they undertook, an ID card service to show they’re an approved member of a legitimate volunteer essential service, and access to community discounts for firies and others essential volunteers.

And for the Wildcare Helpline app we worked with the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) to develop an app that provides a service for the WA public who find sick or injured native wildlife and are seeking advice on where to find care for the animal.

We’ve also developed a number of apps along with DBCA and Trails WA to help the community enjoy the natural beauty of WA as well!. Camping Mate and Marine Parks WA are both DBCA apps aimed at ensuring the user maximises their experience of the Park facilities in WA, both on land ad water. And Trails WA provides detailed information – even when off-grid – to hikers hitting the extensive bike and walking tracks in WA.

And finally, it’s worth noting we also develop apps that have a very restricted purpose. The Mosquito Monitoring App is the first for the Atlas of Environmental Health (AEH). It was made specifically for the use of Environmental Health Officers within WA local governments. More recently, the AEH and the Mosquito Monitoring app have become useful in the Victorian health arena.

You can read more about our work on mobile apps over the last decade, or check out our current mobile apps in the Apple and Android app stores. (Other apps we’ve developed can be found on our client app stores.)

If you’re interested in how our mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to email me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

The post Our mobile apps – a recap appeared first on Gaia Resources.

New updates have been made to Slug Sleuth, an app that aims to help scientists, locals and visitors to collect observation data for slugs and snails within Mount Kaputar National Park and adjacent Nandewar Ranges within NSW. This recent release includes a refreshed user interface and an added feature to use pictures already stored on phone.

Screenshots from the Slug Sleuth app

The app is available for both Apple and Android devices, and you can see a range of our current mobile apps in the Apple and Android app stores. Other apps we’ve developed can be found on our client app stores.

If you’re interested in how our mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to email me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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On Wednesday 9 December, Chris Roach and I attended a webinar hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), celebrating its 10 years of existence and showcasing research into the role of Big Data and data science modelling techniques in managing Australian biodiversity. It was a chance for me to also reflect on my journey in parallel with the ALA in the early days when I was at the Western Australian Museum. I was involved there in aligning the Arachnology database fields with the TDWG Darwin Core standard, so the web team could mobilise our data; then later in environmental consulting; and now here at Gaia Resources where we share much of the ideals of the ALA in enabling open biodiversity data sharing and aligning to internationally recognised standards.

The following provides a summary of some of the important research that was described in this particular seminar series of three speakers.

With platforms such as the ALA, the amount of biodiversity data available has dramatically increased in the last 10 years and empowered biodiversity conservation with so much more confidence in actions undertaken; but many of the ecological challenges that we have faced in the past still remain. These challenges can be summed up in three main areas:

• Sampling bias,
• Incomplete coverage and,
• Data quality.

Professor Melodie McGeoch (La Trobe University) discussed the importance of not just focusing on documenting populations of threatened, vulnerable, and endangered species; but also the need to recognise the importance of occurrence data for “common” species. Whether a species is recognised as common depends on temporal trends, local abundance, and spatial range; and significant declines in any of these areas may go unnoticed when a species is thought to be common enough not to require frequent monitoring. In terms of identifying refuges for preventing diversity and biomass decline, Prof. McGeoch advocated for the modelling of ALA and other data of both rare and common species at a more localised level to understand geographic variation and abundance over time.

PhD candidate Tianxiao (August) Hao (University of Melbourne) used his research in fungal diversity in Australia to show the rapid increase in data availability. Some of this data, however, is unreliable, and so careful consideration must be taken prior to analysis as to whether the data is of a high enough standard to be useful. He acknowledged the new technology and rigorous screening that new data submitted to the ALA undergoes and the large clean up operation that is underway to increase the quality of legacy data.

Both August and Professor Jane Elith (University of Melbourne) demonstrated how the available data is still biased greatly by sampling effort due to environmental or logistical constraints. It makes sense that the easiest to reach places, such as areas near population centres, coastlines and, along roads are the most heavily sampled.

Professor Elith also highlighted the much forgotten bias introduced by a deficiency in absence data. Most ‘observation’ records are for presence data, but having knowledge of what areas have been sampled (and how) without finding occurrences, is possibly of equal significance to documenting the presence of species. Predictive modelling of species distributions are so much more powerful when they can account for bias and ideally this presence-absence type of data capture should be integrated into research and citizen science initiatives.

Professor Elith showcased the eBird initiative as a good example of where using citizen science can provide comprehensive coverage of occurrence data over time.

Gaia Resources is no stranger to considerations of presence-absence data and has developed several Citizen Science solutions over the years. We have also worked with conservation groups like the Great Victoria Desert Biodiversity Trust to plan habitat survey strategies (check out our blog here).

With the help of open-access biodiversity data such as that provided by the ALA, we can all play a part in overcoming the challenges faced in conservation. Here’s to the next 10 years!

If you’d like to know more about this topic or would like to discuss your own Big Data and biodiversity projects, please drop me a line at mieke.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Mieke

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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

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Yet, it has traditionally been the scientific paper that takes precedence as the vector for knowledge, with its core data relegated to a few tables locked into print format. The bulk of the collected data is left in lab books, spreadsheets and analysis software formats in the scientist’s office, or at best as supplementary digital data tables on the journal’s website.

What happens at the two ends of a scientific project can be the most critical. Once a ‘research question’ has been proposed, defining what data must be collected and the methods that ensure rigour and accuracy of recording data become paramount. Poor project design can kill a project. Likewise, once ‘the paper’ is out, where does the data go?

Data capture is increasingly being aided by automation, such as sensors that measure one parameter accurately, repeatedly and automatically submitting the data points to the scientist digitally. Smartphone apps are now commonly used to improve the accuracy of observations by providing their users with accurate automated data on geo-location and date/time, as well as controlled vocabularies for each form field.

Submitted data is then stored in a project data repository where administrators can vet, validate, curate and download data for further analysis. While the project is active the data is maintained; but, once the paper is out and the research funds dry up? In the figure above, the ideal ‘life cycle’ is illustrated.

Nature Science Data provides a best practice model for projects that result in a scientific publication. It mandates the release of datasets with accompanying Data Descriptors, instructs authors to submit datasets to an appropriate public data repository, and maintains a list of vetted data repositories.

To make the data maximally retrievable and reusable, (globally) agreed data standards are crucial. One example from the biological realm is the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), a non-profit scientific community dedicated to developing biodiversity data standards.

In my neck of the science woods, herbarium and museum collections provide an excellent long-term store of absolutely raw data, in the form of a preserved specimen from which multiple researchers over time can extract useful data. With the digitisation revolution in recent decades this fundamental biodiversity has been captured and liberated through institutional websites (eg. FloraBase – the Western Australian Flora) and federated to provide national (Atlas of Living Australia) and global (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) data portals.

For example, as part of UWA’s honey bee project I scored phenological data for a eucalypt species complex using Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) standard fields. This data was appended to metadata in the WA Herbarium’s specimen database to become available to researchers around the world.

So, a clearly conceived Data Management Plan should be essential for any scientific research and Citizen Science projects are no different. However, CS projects commonly have a very low funding base, run for just a relatively short period and may be related to a single researcher’s project for which the outcome is a thesis or paper. If a project ends and the digital datasets are not adequately archived in a useable format in a major searchable repository then that hard-won data cannot be maximally discoverable and re-usable.

A good fall-back in this situation would be to at least lodge the data and metadata in the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS aims to make Australia’s research data assets more valuable for researchers, research institutions and the nation. The site contains many guides to standards, methods and contribution – and is well-worth referring to when considering your next research project.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post The Data Challenge for (Citizen) Science appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Mount Kaputar Land Snail and Slug Threatened Ecological Community is an assemblage of at least twenty species of native land snails and one slug known from high elevation and dry rainforests of the Mount Kaputar region, in particular, the Giant Pink Slug (Triboniophorus aff. graeffei) a local endemic species and the most obvious and commonly seen member of this endangered ecological community.

Screenshots from the Slug Sleuth app (beautiful work on the logo Tracey!)

In the first version, the Slug Sleuth app is designed to record sightings of the Giant Pink Slug within its known range. In future, the app will also allow users to record sightings of the two most commonly encountered snail species. Data collected using this app will help environmental managers, land managers and the community learn more about the distribution and habitat for this threatened ecological community, and assist the implementation of long term conservation strategies.

All data submitted via this app will ultimately be made available through BioNet, NSW’s corporate biodiversity data repository. BioNet data is accessible to researchers, land managers, government agencies and the public via the BioNet website and the SEED portal. The app is available for both Apple and Android devices.

Of special interest to Gaia Resources is that this app is developed to submit data to the NPWS BioSys repository. BioSys is an open-source, standards-based data management system built specifically for biological data. The system has a flexible data schema model that allows users to create a schema specific to the structure of their data, and that can apply to just about any sorts of biological and ecological data. It was initially developed in collaboration with Paul Gioia and DBCA biodiversity informatics staff.

Other apps developed on the BioSys platform and recently released include I Spy Koala.

If you’re interested in how BioSys and mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

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The ‘price of entry’ for establishing a successful citizen science project seems at first glance to be small. After all, a single scientist with an army of volunteers can get a long way with a well-designed project, and the primary cost is time, some notebooks and computer skills. Engagement is key, as we’ve discussed many times previously.

Many citizen science project leaders come to us looking for the next step – to streamline data flow, improve data accuracy, or extend their volunteer range (in both age and location). A smartphone app is usually what they are looking for. If they have little funding they must usually resort to using existing freely-available apps that meet enough of their data needs; or cajole a mate, colleague or their own offspring to have a crack at developing what they need.

This approach can solve the data capture or front-end process. but the back-end data repository is often neglected, and getting the data out can be difficult and time-consuming. For this part of the market, where good science is required to investigate real-world issues in conservation (traditionally an area that receives little funding anyway), there a couple of new initiatives that might be of great use to Citizen Science.

Google Glide app example

The first is Glide – a new open platform for developing simple yet flexible web apps – without code. From a Google Sheet, Glide assembles an attractive, data-driven app that can be customised and simply shared. Updates to the design or spreadsheet flow on to the user without fuss. Launched in February, this no-code platform makes defining custom fields with controlled vocabularies, automated fields, integrated image uploads and good design available to anyone who can wrangle a spreadsheet.

All submitted data is stored in a Google Sheet, which also makes data management pretty easy too. What Glide apps can’t currently do is associate a geocode with each record, due to privacy concerns. Their work-around is to allow you to enter an address, which is then geo-located and used to represent the observation on a map. The geocode itself is not stored in your sheet, but much work is going into developing the platform and this limitation may soon change.

The second is a new partnership between the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and iNaturalist, the world’s leading global social biodiversity network.

Last month the ALA launched iNaturalist Australia, the Australian node of iNaturalist. It can be used to record individual plant, animal and fungi sightings and thereby access identification specialists who examine your associated images to verify your identification.

iNaturalist – Dolphin project map

While the ALA will be phasing out some of their existing functionality as a result of this iNaturalist partnership (eg. their Record a Sighting function), their BioCollect program continues, with a renewed focus on project-based surveys for environmental and citizen scientists.

To summarise, Glide apps are easy enough to set up and configure to capture any number of fields, data types and media. The data and media are stored in the Google Drive cloud in a readily-accessible CSV format. They are free at the first tier, and fairly inexpensive even at the Pro level for a yearly fee. The apps can be freely distributed and used by project volunteers. Direct geolocation of observations is not currently supported, but addresses can be captured and represented on maps.

iNaturalist and the ALA provide a solid backend infrastructure for setting up projects and linking them into their core datasets for names, taxa, images and user records. The project setup is simple enough, and users can opt in via the free iNaturalist app. Specialists can vet submitted records and images to make the submitted data ‘research grade’. However, the amount of data captured is fixed to a small number of predefined fields such as date, geolocation, species name.

These are both great starting solutions for the many worthy citizen science projects that don’t have reliable funding.  We’ve now helped clients set up both Glide apps (eg. for Black Cockatoos) and iNaturalist apps in Australia, which has meant that they can overcome the barrier of ‘the price of entry’ at the very least – and helps with the ‘longevity of data’ somewhat – although I’ll write more about the ‘longevity of data’ in a subsequent post.

While Glide and iNaturalist might work for a range of smaller groups, for those that have more complex research requirements, as well as grants or institutional backing to capture exactly what their project requires, a bespoke citizen science app is still the most valuable tool to quickly capture high-quality research data.  We’ve built a range of these over the years, and we’ve had significant success – there are a few interesting initiatives in the app space that we’ll be also discussing soon.  In the meantime, we’ll keep looking for more ways that we can support the citizen science community in Australia with ideas and tools like these.

In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, setting up these simple Glide or iNaturalist apps, or how a bespoke smartphone app could even more effectively improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Recent advances for citizen science apps appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Associate Professor Kirsten Parris (right) from the University of Melbourne’s School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences covered a lot of ground during each two-hour workshop, explaining: the structure of the Clean Air Urban Landscapes (CAUL) Hub, its role as one of six National Environmental Science Programs (NESP), her role as CAUL Hub leader, the aims of the four modules in the Urban Wildlife app – Frogs, Flying-foxes, Beneficial Insects and Possums and gliders, the science behind her Bell frog research, how to use the observation and survey functions of the app, and where does the data go once citizen scientists have contributed the data.

During the workshop, Kirsten taught attendees how to conduct field surveys using the CAUL Urban Wildlife app, after which they could be flagged as trained in the administrative backend for the app. In the last third of the workshop attendees visited UWA’s Sunken Gardens to put their new-found skills to the test during a practice frog survey, though sadly, no frogs could be heard or seen. Two days later, a quick afternoon trip to a backyard in suburban Hamilton Hill was resoundingly successful!

Frog survey in UWA’s Sunken Garden

Motorbike frogs in a Hamilton Hill backyard

Gaia Resources were initially engaged by the CAUL Hub in 2017 to develop the Urban Wildlife citizen science app to enable data capture for a range of urban species – Bell frogs, Flying-foxes and Beneficial insects. We very recently added a fourth module, for all Australian Possums and Gliders, sponsored by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

The design allows for multiple projects to be available via a single app login so that volunteers could choose to participate in any project. Each project has an independent data schema and the app would check in to the schema server on startup to ensure the latest schema was in use. This saved users from having to update the app in some circumstances when schema changes were made.

The free CAUL Urban Wildlife app is available on Android and iPhone: https://nespurban.edu.au/platforms/caul-urban-wildlife-app/.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, or how a smartphone app could improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then please 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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The app allows the community to record sightings of certain urban wildlife species, which feeds into research and evidence-based management of these species. First launched in early 2017, it originally included modules for flying foxes, beneficial insects and some species of frogs.

We are very excited to have added a possum and glider module recently, as part of a collaboration between the Threatened Species Recovery (TSR) Hub and the CAUL Hub.

The possum and glider module follows a similar format to other three, with clear screens for recording observations, uploading data and viewing all possum and glider records on a map.

There are 27 species of possum and glider across Australia, so to save users scrolling through all 27 species when making an observation, we configured the app to provide a customised list of species for each user based on their current location (using a geofencing approach).

Possum and glider module in the CAUL Urban Wildlife App

I really enjoyed working with lead researcher Dr Rochelle Steven (University of Queensland) on this new module. Rochelle is very passionate about Australia’s possums and gliders and believes people in the community can do a lot to help support better conservation, especially in urban areas.

“Some people think urban areas are not important for threatened species conservation, but some species are only or mainly found in urban areas, like South Western Australia’s Critically Endangered western ringtail possum,” said Dr Steven.

“Almost a quarter of our possums and gliders are listed as threatened under Australian environmental law, and many more show signs of decline.

“The main threat to Australia’s possums and gliders is habitat loss, but in urban areas, dogs, cats, being hit by cars are also major problems.

“Knowing where species are and how they are using the urban environment is an important first step to conserving them, and we are calling on citizen scientists to help us by submitting sightings through the CAUL Urban Wildlife app”.

In this video, Rochelle describes her research into using citizen science for the management of threatened species, and the addition of the possum and glider module to the Urban Wildlife App.

Video about citizen science research (source: TSR Hub Facebook)

For more information about the research project see the TSR Hub news.

The possum and glider citizen science project is a collaboration between the Threatened Species Recovery Hub and the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, with funding from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program and the National Landcare Program through the South West Catchments Council.

The CAUL Urban Wildlife app is freely available on both iOS and Android platforms, and can be downloaded from the Gaia Resources pages on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

For more information about the modular approach and technical solution we implemented for the Urban Wildlife App, please see our project summary.

If you’re interested in Citizen Science and mobile data collection apps that could help your organisation, feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

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The app is now live for both Android and iOS and we were fortunate enough to have the NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean launch the app over the past weekend in conjunction with the announcement of a new koala hospital in Port Stephens.

I Spy Koala splash screen

We will continue to support and promote open source and the collaboration opportunities it allows for BioSys and our other systems into the future.

You can download the app from here for iOS or Android if you would like to try it out (and have some nearby koalas!).

If you’re interested in how BioSys, or mobile data collection apps, could help your organisation, then feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

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Our newest paper Listening to Save Wildlife: Lessons Learnt from Use of Acoustic Technology by a Species Recovery Team, demonstrates how technology design research can reveal new opportunities, barriers, and future needs for conservation technology. Having been presented at the Designing Interactive Systems Conference in June, we would like to share it with you, as well as bonus pictures, sweet serenades of bristlebirds, and more about my work with the team!

The endangered Eastern Bristlebird (Dasyornis brachypterus)

There is little doubt that plants, animals, and ecosystems are declining at an alarming rate, and conservationists are looking for technology to support their tireless work to reverse these trends. In the early days of using technologies for conservation, the tools used were often created for other purposes (e.g. military or biomedical). Recently, conservationists have taken to developing their own technical solutions, exchanging experiences, opportunities, and barriers, such as through the conservation technology network WildLabs.Net or through social media channels (also see #Tech4Wildlife and newer #Tech4Wild).

A WildLabs.Net website screenshot

With the wonderfully burgeoning development of innovative conservation technologies has come new challenges. There is now an abundance of conservation technologies on the market that people can purchase, such as acoustic sensors and camera traps. These devices allow for massive amounts of data to be collected at a low cost, with minimal disturbance to the animals. This is certainly great, but before running off to purchase these devices we need to have a solid plan for what the data should look like, and what happens to it once we have it. In advance of purchasing devices, questions such as following should be considered:

• Are people going to use any particular data and metadata standards to ensure that the data can be easily shared for broadscale use?
• What biological and technical expertise is required to analyse the data? Do the volumes of data collected require a particular technological infrastructure to manage?
• How is the data going to be used, analysed, and managed?
• How can technologies be used to support conservation beyond locating and quantifying sneaky species? Are the data useful for conservation activities beyond simply finding the target critters?
• If so, what data analysis adaptations are needed? It’s worth thinking of these types of questions well in advance.

Check out the paper to learn about the Eastern Bristlebird Recovery Team’s goals, conservation activities, invaluable knowledge, and interest in acoustics, but even beyond that the team taught me a huge amount about efforts to save bristlebirds. Visiting Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary several times, I learned for myself just how tricky these feathered beauties are to see and photograph, even when captive! Can you spot them?

While visiting the aviaries I learned about nesting behaviours of bristlebirds, and worked with the team to deploy sensors where keepers thought best to capture a variety of bristlebird calls. The keeper herself shared so much invaluable information about the calls with me while we worked together, and even challenged me to identify which individuals birds were making calls! I don’t have her skills! I also had the pleasure of meeting Penny, a former New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage dog who assisted in the surveys to find Eastern bristlebirds in their wild habitats. She is now retired, but it was absolutely amazing watching how hard and efficiently she worked, bounding through tall grass, rapidly picking up the bristlebird scent during a training!

Once we brought the recorders back to the lab, I explored the audio data with team members playing audio of bristlebirds calling, while looking at associated visualisations of sound (i.e. spectrograms), and then discussing calls.

Call type 1

Call type 2

Call type 3

The team takes on a wide variety of tasks to combat the decline of Eastern bristlebirds, regularly evolving new techniques, and eagerly trying new technologies to improve bristlebird conservation outcomes.

From studying this team through a technology design lens, we identified 5 key aspects that warrant detailed consideration by both designers and conservationists to create innovative, impactful conservation technologies into the future.

1. Discern Goals & Motives: Understanding what is driving members of the group both individually and collectively can help share the technological infrastructure so that a variety of interests can be investigated with new
   data.

2. Improve Skills and Knowledge: Interested parties may lack the biological and/or technical skills required to collect and/or analyse data. It’s important to consider how technology can be designed to improve skills.

3. Facilitate Information Exchange: Technology has an important role to play in allowing people to share knowledge and exchange findings in new ways.

4. Extend Beyond the Team: Conservationists are often overburdened, and so it’s worthwhile considering what is needed for broader groups, such as citizen scientists, to participate in use of new technologies in
   conservation.

5. Design for Engagement, Usability, and Conservation Impact: When needing to review large quantities of data, it’s essential to design technology that is fun, usable, and produces accurate analysis to inform conservation efforts.

Technology designers have skills necessary to investigate such complex, wicked problems, and including technology design research in the conservation technology pipeline will reveal novel ways that technology could support conservation more effectively.

You can read Jessie’s complete post on the Queensland University of Technology’s Ecosounds site. You can also give us your feedback by comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

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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

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