Martin Westgate
@martinwestgate
Australian biodiversity scientist. Occasional scientific software developer. Former professional gift wrapper. Blog: LinkedIn: Insta:
Rhys Cairncross - high dingo densities reduced fox scavenging activity but increased scavenging by possums. Foxes also time their scavenging to avoid encountering dingoes.
Kylie Cairns - latest evidence suggests some moderate historic mixing of wild dogs with dingoes, but limited recent mixing. Dog-dingo hybrids are quite rare in the wild. There is however evidence of recent loss of genetic diversity in SE Australian populations.
Alejandro Trujillo-Gonzalez - different eDNA methods have different efficiency levels, but some really promising results from passive DNA capture and drone-based capture
Maree Wright - CISS is working in partnership with CSIRO to release and monitor biocontrol of African Boxthorn in the ACT. [mw: as someone who had a job weeding this species when I was 17, this is good to hear]
Justin Borevitz - In snow gums, differences between subspecies result from genes linked to climate adaptation
Bruno Ferronato - rocky edges on urban wetlands can lead to turtles changing direction to avoid them, or sometimes to mortality where they try to cross.
Emma Cook - Tuggeranong Lignum will under some circumstances become hermaphroditic, which came as a surprise to the project team. The fruits are fleshy like lychee, but apparently don’t taste of much.
Damon Little - stepping in to give a talk without slides due to tech problems 😅 By 2029, NSW will have spent $2.44m over 12 years to restore 1200 hectares for Superb Parrots, with 80% survival of tube stock. All funded sites retain Superbs, but also resulted in benefits for other taxa as well.
McLean Cobden - moving to an occupancy-based approach to Superb Parrot modelling, with a priori specification of the analytical method used to interpret the results
Marlon Taylor - agile antechinus have actually been pretty stable across their range in recent decades, but have been largely lost from the ACT, perhaps because we’re on the dryer and hotter edge of their range
Megan Head - 80% of Australian invertebrates are taxonomically undescribed. Genetic methods give us a way to understand biodiversity in terms of taxonomic units. This study found low species overlap between sites in the same region and ecosystem
Niamh O’Kelly - Grassland Earless Dragons are so hard to observe they were presumed extinct until 1991 (!!!) [mw: this is an oddly common pattern in Australian fauna, mirrored by Leadbeaters Possum and the Night Parrot, for example]
Emma Cook & Depi Susilawati - Bossiaea grayi exists along river corridors that are predominantly used for forestry, making conservation of an already fragmentation-prone species even harder. These site also have lots of blackberry which competes for space.
Ruby Olsson - what are our options for managing threatened species in the Australian Alps? Often unclear from policy docs whether our goal is to resist, direct or accept environmental change. Often we implicitly leap to resist strategies, but this may be unrealistic given the effort required.
Finally starting to feel more human after a week of jet lag ✈️😴 Walks and sunshine are helping Back to the office on Monday for more biodiversity informatics good stuff 👨🏻💻💪🏽
In case anyone cares, my single AI use-case was aligning these logos (top-right) in html / Quarto. It worked 👍🏼
Joe Miller - GBIF data is used in papers, so of which then get used by globally-important reports, e.g. IPBES
Working towards a planetary knowledge base - an LLM based on collections data
Ester Gaya - Kew is the largest fungarium in the world with over 1 million specimens, including 50k types which are the focus of the sequencing project - 20k complete to date
The project requires a huge number of people, including many for digitising but also quality control
Alan Paton - this project wasn’t just digitisation, but also a new collection management system and a new data portal (which uses the ALA platform)
Session 6 getting started by Angela McLean celebrating the completion of the digitisation of Kew’s collections