Martin Westgate

🚨🐸 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

Darryl MacKenzie on occupancy modelling

Yamil Edgardo Di Blanco on studying some of the coolest animals in the world (personal opinion lol)

Matt on his journey scaling up from single studies to large collaborations to answer more (and more interesting) questions. Plus heaps of monkey pics

More on the science behind WildObs from Matt Luskin

First data from WildObs (occurrences + images) is online now via ALA

collections.ala.org.au/public/show/...

Jenna Wraith introducing new features from the Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs)

Amazing work from Courtney Davis (eBird/Cornell) on status and trends of the world’s bird species

Spending the morning learning from the Monitoring Biodiversity at Large Scales session at #ICCB2025

Great talk by @hannahsfraser.bsky.social on assessing condition of bird communities

@patmnorman.bsky.social on how to get tree heights out of lidar data at landscape scales #ICCB2025

Our tools to support open science workflows:

- galah for getting data programmatically with a DOI galah.ala.org.au
- ALA labs for analytics & visualisation tips labs.ala.org.au
- galaxias for publishing data to GBIF via your local node galaxias.ala.org.au

Fantastic talk at #ICCB2025 by @shandiya.bsky.social on our teams’ work supporting open data *and* code at ALA