Today is the 30th anniversary of Hackers

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...

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

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 ...

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

@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...

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

Cool remote talk by Millie Chapman on political legacies in GBIF #ICCB2025 milliechapman.info www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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

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

🚨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 🌏

This mobile-friendly & R-friendly app lets you create species checklists for a specified area 📋🐦🦘🌱 It uses global and national data (from GBIF & ALA) to make a list comprehensive & fast! Cool new tool from an awesome group of people made with #Shiny & #rstats🧪🌏 unsw.shinyapps.io/infinitylists/

Happy 18th birthday ggplot2! #rstats

If you’re into #rstats & will be at #ICCB2025 make sure to stop by the Atlas of Living Australia stand! Our new hex stickers just arrived…

Excited to be at #ICCB2025 in 2 weeks! * Sunday 15 workshop: Introducing galah: the Atlas of Living Australia's R Interface for Accessing Biodiversity Data with @rowdynerd.bsky.social * Monday 16 talk: Supporting Scientists and Decision-makers to use Biodiversity Data #conservation #rstats 🧪🌏

A perfect autumn day in Canberra

Word

Heading over to ANU shortly to hear my boss talk about the ALA. Tune in here from 12:30 CBR time: fennerschool.anu.edu.au/news-events/...

Public holidays are for baking slightly lumpy cinnamon scrolls

Enlighten festival in Canberra is a delight! 🔦🌈 Just check out the National Gallery on Friday night 😍

Spotted these two friends outside Parliament House this arvo, very calmly eating seeds and not at all bothered by me pointing a phone at them! Beautiful creatures

Dudes where’s the best place to print hex stickers these days? I’m in Australia if that makes a difference #rstats

I’m low key convinced (worried?) that making *exactly* 24 biscuits each week is one of my top 5 skills

Evolving intelligent life took billions of years − but it may not have been as unlikely as many scientists predicted theconversation.com/evolving-int...

We had a beautiful visitor to our garden this lunchtime; a ~ metre long brown snake. It took a stroll through the grass before hiding under the raised bed, then out through a gap in the fence. So lovely to have a visit from the neighbours!

New version of galah is out now (2.1.1)! A few fixes etc but the best bit is a vignette on reproducible data by @daxkellie.bsky.social Shows how to: - get a DOI on a download - cite it in your paper - re-download any dataset from a DOI cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Crazy storms *again* this arvo in Canberra. What a summer.

There’s a magnificent old Euc near our place that’s lost two major branches since December. I’m really hoping it’s not in trouble. Anyone know how to check if a tree like this is healthy?

The new series of Lego collectable minifigures just came out in Australia, you know I got the pirate quartermaster. She’s super cool, but look at that Cockatoo!! So cute 😍

Took a drive out to Yass yesterday with the fam. The young one loved the park by the river, great spot for a picnic! Plus old rail bridges ftw 🚂

I spent some of this morning writing from the Hancock Building, aka the ANU Science library. Such a beautiful space! 10/10 would recommend 😁

Australia's waterbird populations almost halved in just one year, survey finds www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01...

Crazy storms in Canberra tonight, as evidenced by this leaf, which blew sideways off the tree behind our house with such force it stuck to the window (hail not shown)

The galah package 📦 lets you use R to download images from Living Atlases around the world! 1. Choose an atlas with `galah_config(atlas = )` galah.ala.org.au/R/articles/q... 2. Download images with `collect_media()` galah.ala.org.au/R/articles/d... #rstats 🌏🐦🦋🐛🌱 (cc @rowdynerd.bsky.social)

Excited to catch up on this! The best Australian science writing of 2024 #booksky

I learned this week that the browser version of MS Word now defaults to autosuggesting the rest of your sentence. Gross.

End of the week, I had some fun today calculating *exactly* how much data is available from the GBIF node network. Turns out it’s quite a bit - 2.5 billion occurrences total 😮

Back in the office today, Moleskine color for 2025 is forest green

Back to work tomorrow, but pleased I managed to finish this first

Merry Christmas everyone! I burnt the meringue this year 😢 so no pavlova, but we still managed a bbq, Eton mess and homemade mango and gingerbread ice creams 🥩🥕🥗🍨

Today at #ESAus2024, the ALA Data & Science teams are demoing {galaxias}, our new R package for sharing biodiversity data. It’s still in dev, but if you want to check it out, the slides are here: ala.quarto.pub/intro-to-gal... I can’t be there 😞 but stop by to ask @daxkellie.bsky.social about it!

We opened our Christmas present to ourselves early this weekend: a kitchenaid ice cream attachment. This is our first batch of mango ice cream and reader it is delightful

This week we released version 2.1.0 of galah, an R package for getting biodiversity data. What's cool is we now support image downloads from a *bunch* of living atlases! Here's a galah in Adelaide by Mononymous on iNaturalist (cc-by-nc 4.0; c/o www.ala.org.au)