Patrick Norman

This paper is now in press at Oikos, and I can submit an image for the journal cover. I have various crappy photos of mistletoe munching tyrannoids; if you have a great shot you can donate to the cause, I’ll shout you a quality beverage at the very next opportunity
www.authorea.com/doi/full/10....

A pheasant coucal is a mass of contradictions: a bewildered bravo rolling through my house like a feathered wrecking ball | Bronwen Scott Swinging wildly from confident to confused, and permanently dishevelled, this most relatable of cuckoos blunders through life as best it can * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast * See more Australian bird of the year content A sudden thud made me look up from my work. A stack of books sprawled across the floor. There were folders too, the contents fanned out like a deck of cards. In the middle, unperturbed by the mess it was creating, a pheasant coucal sauntered down the hallway. The bird was a feathered wrecking ball. In those days, I lived in a traditional Queenslander. The hall was once a veranda running the full length of the house. It had been enclosed with louvres to make a pleasant, airy office. I’d leave the door open to catch the breeze. To wildlife, an open door is an invitation. I’d been visited by a grey fantail, an entire family of pied butcherbirds and a brush-turkey, who had entered with uncharacteristic stealth and made off with a shoe. This was the first pheasant coucal. Continue reading...

A pheasant coucal is a mass of contradictions: a bewildered bravo rolling through my house like a feathered wrecking ball | Bronwen Scott

🚀 Exciting update! The GeoAI Python package is getting even smarter — soon it will support AI agents.

That means you’ll be able to use natural language to effortlessly download, analyze, and visualize geospatial data 🌍🤖

Stay tuned for the upcoming release!
🔗 GitHub: github.com/opengeos/geoai

A Maxar satellite image of Mt Fuji. The satellite was only 3 degrees above the horizon at the time, so the capture angle is almost directly side on instead of top down.

Just spent some time digging through old Maxar/DigitalGlobe blogs to find a reference image and found this incredible capture of Mt Fuji. Incredible.

The satellite was only three degrees above the horizon when it captured this image.

blog.maxar.com/earth-intell...

As the giant #Antarctic iceberg #A23a is currently breaking apart, we created a video about its dance in the water in the last year, including spinning in a Taylor column! Even though A23a is not sea ice, the microwave signature is similar and it shows up in our data! Can you spot it in the video?

#USGS #CorridorMappingTeam - #Ungulate #Migrations of #West
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tinyurl.com/2tt37swu
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doi.org/10.3133/sir2...
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #USWest #route #ecosystems #wildlife #publicland #privateland #opendata #fedopendata #fedscience #tracking #GPS #seasonal #habitat #protection #management #USFWS

Flower of Eupomatia bennettii

Nice to wake up to some weird magnoliid action this morning. Here is a flowering Eupomatia bennettii (small bolwarra) in our dry rainforest garden.

State forestry corporation accused of failing to protect endangered glider Conservationists call for an end to native forest logging in NSW after the state’s forestry corporation is accused of logging breaches in Tallaganda State Forest.

Good on the NSW EPA! “The alleged offences include failing to properly search for and identify glider den trees before logging, failing to replace hollow-bearing … trees that were damaged or felled, and damaging the habitat of a threatened species.”
🧪
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Chlorophyll concentrations in South Australian coastal waters on 13 August 2025. Note the broad spread of light blue areas, and the noticeable yellow zones along the coast, with highest concentrations close to the shores, around Adelaide and Kangaroo island.

Parts of South Australia, especially around Adelaide - home to the Australian Space Agency - continue to be affected by an ongoing microalgae bloom. Algal blooms are a natural phenomena, but this one has lingered for months.

(Pic: chlorophyll concentration from #Copernicus Sentinel-3 on 13 August)

Drone Mapping Software - OpenDroneMap™ Drone mapping software. Generate maps, point clouds, 3D models and DEMs from images, any orientation, any camera.

🤔
We’re collecting cool datasets to show on OpenDroneMap.org, but it also might be useful to have a sentence from you on how you use OpenDroneMap and how it has effected you in your industry.

How has OpenDroneMap changed / improved / supported what you do in your sector?
🤔

Snow covered street curving away from the camera. Everything is white.

Biggest snow fall in decades here in Armidale NSW. We usually get an occasional flurry that doesn't settle. Heavy snow fell all day, around 40cm+ in drifts around our yard. Lots of fun, but also lots of trees cracking and falling, not used to the weight. Some birds struggling to fly!

We would like to thank Professor Michael Calver as he steps down as the #PacificConsBio Editor-in-Chief after 15 years of service!

From cover to cover, your work has left a lasting impression, thank you for your unbinding commitment!

You’ve always had the write stuff!

@CSIROpublishing.bsky.social

1/ Working with big data in R?
Your wrangling just got a massive upgrade.
duckplyr is now in the tidyverse—and it’s fast. Really fast. 🧵

This image features part of Bolivia. This vibrant image was created using the radar instrument’s different polarisation channels, with each colour revealing distinct characteristics of the landscape. For instance, green hues mainly represent rainforest, red hues forested floodplains and wetlands, and blue–purple is indicative of grasslands, while black areas are rivers and lakes. The image spans approximately 90 km along the Biomass satellite's flight path (length) and 60 km across in width, with north oriented to the right.

🆕 The first stunning images from our groundbreaking #Biomass satellite mission have been released – they mark a major leap forward in our ability to understand how Earth’s forests are changing and exactly how they contribute to the global carbon cycle 🌳🌍

www.esa.int/Applications...

🚀 Exciting news! The #GeoAI Python package now lets you train land cover classification models with just one line of code.

Leverage any PyTorch segmentation model from smp.readthedocs.io — with hundreds of image encoders & pretrained weights available.

Release 2.9.0 · PDAL/PDAL Changes of Note GDAL VSI Support @normanb added support for GDAL VSI in #4647. It is now possible to use VSI to control access to remote content. Any /vsi-prefixed file path will go through GDAL's...

I am pleased to announce the release of PDAL 2.9.0

github.com/PDAL/PDAL/re...

Goodies include GDAL VSI support by Norman Barker, FileSpec support by Thomas Swamy, filters.supervoxel by Bram Ton, SPZ read/write, `ogr` option for filtering, and greatly enhanced readers.tindex support by Isaac Bell.

Great Poster session!
It was great discussions biodiversity conservation in African rainforest with all of you. And I look forward to developping the ideas we shared #ICCB2025
#Brisbane #Australia

Thank you to all those who stopp🙏🙏🙏

Thanks to everyone who shared #rstats hex stickers so far at #ICCB2025! Some very cool projects represented here…

Great talk by @drdave.bsky.social at #ICCB2025 Exploring connectivity, patch size and how technology can help in our monitoring.

galah hex logo. An illustration of a galah (an australian species of cockatoo) with pink feathers on its head and chest and grey feathers on its wings. The galah is inside a hexagon with aqua green, sunburst background. Outside of the hexagon is a pattern of pink dots exploding outwards from behind the hexagon in all directions

🚨galah 2.1.2 is on CRAN! 📦

This version fixes a major bug that prevented queries with more complex filters from returning the correct result. It also adds a way to get species conservation status from authoritative lists

🔗 Details: galah.ala.org.au/news/index.h...

#rstats @rowdynerd.bsky.social 🌏

🚀 Excited to share the draft Table of Contents for my upcoming book, "Introduction to GIS Programming: A Practical #Python Guide to Open Source Geospatial Tools." 📚

github.com/giswqs/intro...

📅 Aiming for a July 2025 release! Stay tuned!

Quolls reintroduced to Flinders Ranges are thriving Native Australian quolls and possums are thriving in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park in South Australia after they were first reintroduced.

Good news and well done the people behind this. 🧪 #nature @euanritchie.bsky.social cosmosmagazine.com/nature/anima...

This tiny Australian bat is the size of a matchbox. But it flies up to 150km a night in search of food Until now, little was known about foraging flights of critically endangered southern bent-wing bats, which roost in caves * Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A tiny, critically endangered bat – roughly the size of a matchbox – can fly about 150km in a single night, new research has found. Southern bent-wing bats roost in caves in south-west Victoria and south-east South Australia. They fly out at night in search of food, eating about half their body weight in insects. Continue reading...

This tiny Australian bat is the size of a matchbox. But it flies up to 150km a night in search of food

The scale of the Mid North Coast floods is staggering. This ESA Sentinel-1 radar image, from yesterday, shows the extent of the flooding. The blue areas are where rivers have swollen and spilled onto floodplains, particularly around Taree and Kempsey. Stay safe everyone. #NSWfloods #Australia

We've done it 🥳

Finally, there's a canonical paper on the #QGIS project, its history, workings, and challenges: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389925001138

Thanks to @timlinux and @mbernasocchi for joining me in trying to tell the QGIS story 💚

#OSGeo #GISChat #GIScience

'My heart sank': Forest home to endangered gliders pegged to be logged Three hours north of Brisbane, a group of greater gliders is living in a section of the St Mary State Forest set to be logged, despite them being a protected species.

Three hours north of Brisbane, a group of greater gliders is living in a section of the St Mary State Forest set to be logged, despite them being a protected species.

🌿 Introducing Leafmap's new sidebar widget for MapLibre!

🔹 Easily add custom widgets like legends, colorbars, images, videos, HTML, and ipywidgets.
🔹 Dynamically adjust the sidebar width for optimal space.
🔹 Manage layer visibility and opacity effortlessly.

github.com/opengeos/lea...

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

Landsat could use your support. The mission's 50+ year data continuity is at risk. If you believe contacting elected representatives does anything, now would be a good time to apply pressure. 🛰️📡

🌍🛰️How cool is this⬇️

☂️Watch as our Biomass's antenna deploys in space!

Following liftoff, orbital injection acquisition of its first signal and satellite in-orbit checks, the successful deployment of Biomass’ mesh antenna reflector marks the final key step in the launch and early operations phase.