Martin Westgate

Yeah two *amazing* ideas, two years in a row?! So cool. It is an interesting community in that way, genuinely really creative about code

Imagine how @rukayaj.bsky.social must feel being 50% all by herself! 😆 Such a cool project tho, I wish I’d thought of it…

I’m proud to be 12.5% of the winners of the 2025 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge! 😆👨🏻‍💻

the galaxias hex logo showing a fun-coloured illustration of a green galaxias fish. The head, gills and fin in the centre with light green on the underside, green lips and wavy shades of green on its back, with blue and orange markings by its eye and gills. The background is light orangey-salmony colour in a sunburst style

🚨Our new package {galaxias} is released in R & Python today! 🚨

📦 galaxias makes it easy to standardise data to Darwin Core, the accepted format for sharing ecological data with infrastructures like @gbif.org and the Atlas of Living Australia

galaxias.ala.org.au

#rstats #python 🧪🌏🐟

A thread 🧵👇

A laneway with neon lights

A bridge over a river in a city

Stickers on a table

Excited to be in Melbourne for #WOMBAT2025!

the cast of Hackers (1995) posing in a series of adjacent phone booths

Today is the 30th anniversary of Hackers

I’m not travelling until 2026, so if that topic sounds interesting and you’re based in Northern Europe, please feel free to reach out!

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been selected as a 2025 #ChurchillFellow, to find ways to improve data quality at ALA & GBIF

www.churchilltrust.com.au/project/to-i...

WOMBAT 2025 - Tutorial Dianne Cook & Harriet Mason - Visualising Unvertainty 29-30 September 2025, Naarm/Melbourne womabt2025.numbat.space

WOMBAT 2025 - Tutorial Jess Hopf - Building better figures: a scientific graphic design workshop 29-30 September 2025, Naarm/Melbourne womabt2025.numbat.space

WOMBAT 2025 - Keynote Nicola Rennie - Designing for decision-making: how to build effective data visualisations. 29-30 September 2025, Naarm/Melbourne womabt2025.numbat.space

If you like #DataViz or a curious about it, come on September 29 for a one-two punch of hands-on tutorials and and stick around for Nicola Rennie's talk on building effective data visualisations the next day.

See the full program & register: wombat2025.numbat.space

#OpenSource #RStats

Man in a purple shirt and jacket

Purple socks

Belated shot of my outfit for #WearItPurple day - turns out my stock of purple outfits leans surprisingly formal, but the socks bring it back a bit 💜

You know what they say: the early bird gets the WOMBAT. 🦚

Early Bird registration ends in just a few days!

wombat2025.numbat.space

I’ll be at day 2 of this, along with @daxkellie.bsky.social and @shandiya.bsky.social; very excited to hear from these speakers!

🚨🐸 Frog Nerds Assemble 🐸🚨

Recently we published a paper on the phylogenetics and taxonomy of Australia and New Guinea's tree frogs, the Pelodryadidae.

Link here: tinyurl.com/4udpmxsm

What does this mean for you Litoria-lovers?
There's a whole bunch more names to use!

Let me explain ...

Whale sculptures at the Queensland Museum

Neon art at the Queensland Museum

A biplane at the Queensland Museum

Lovely event to mark the end of #ICCB2025 last night, congrats to the organisers for a fantastic conference!

Read the paper here:

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Ditto for duplication, lovely visualisations here 😍

Very cool dataset-level summaries of major quality issues

@jamesbeedorey.bsky.social on cleaning biodiversity data using beebdc #ICCB2025

jbdorey.github.io/BeeBDC/

Neat work by Lamuel Chung (UQ): Multi-species occupancy models for quantifying quoll distributions from large-scale camera trap studies #ICCB2025

This sounds pretty cool - the ability to programmatically download any dataset from a DOI is a great feature, and super important for reproducibility.

{galah} has supported this feature for ALA for some time, but we’ll aim to add it for GBIF shortly

galah.ala.org.au/R/articles/d...

I only saw one, but I had to leave before the Q&A unfortunately 🥲

Wasn’t it?! So many cool insights. For me the opening talk was closest to my everyday work, though seen in a fresh light; but all the talks were neat

Ummm, from the GBIF annual meeting perhaps? It was circular, so I had to cut it down to size to match the others 🤣✂️

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

Iadine Chades introducing the new Environmental Informatics Hub at Monash University #ICCB2025

Cool remote talk by Millie Chapman on political legacies in GBIF #ICCB2025

milliechapman.info

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Darryl discussing future of occupancy-based methods

‘A curious elephant is very destructive’ - Matt Luskin on the risks of camera trapping in the tropics lol

Courtney sharing lessons from eBird for newer observatories - keep in touch with your users and ‘don’t fret’!

So cool to hear about the history *and* current state of occupancy modelling