I agree – this is a very welcome development, and it’s early days; I’m sure it will improve rapidly though. Whilst recognising that there are lots(!) of excellent data repositories out there already, with necessarily specialist functionality, there’s long been a need for something that can overarch these effectively, a ‘discovery portal of discovery portals’. Hopefully this can help do that.

After a cursory look, a couple of things struck me, from a user perspective: 1 –definitely some odd/limited search results at the moment, but as noted it’s early days – it’ll snowball as data owners get on board and standards adjust accordingly. 2 – more search tools would be beneficial e.g. date range tools, a map/bounding box search tool (cf Microsoft’s FetchClimate tool).

I also wanted to understand a bit more behind how it’s working – I assumed markup but wondered what ‘semantic web’ stuff this is drawing on. This article gives a bit more info, but I wonder how different it is to other efforts in this regard, e.g. how ARIES team have been developing semantic based tools to find best available datasets for ecosystem service modelling.

Final thought – it raises interesting questions and challenges about how to ensure things like quality and suitability are going to be measured objectively. It seems like this is an issue to be tackled as the tool develops and data owners engage more as it grows…

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to conservation technology and just getting acquainted with the extent and problems in the field. Data aggregation, standardisation and storage keep popping up as chronic problems across a lot of areas. Data seems to exist in sort of silos with different filing and access arrangements between them.

I would be interested to hear: Has the google dataset search improved drastically since its inception? Are there alternative solutions out there, or are there efforts to create them?

For example, from the bioacoustics meetup the other day, the vast datasets from the Australian Acoustic Observatory and Cornell Bioacoustics Centre don't seem to show up on google dataset search. 

Andy the ARIES team you mentioned released a preview video of the interface with their ecosystem services modelling software. It seems really cool, is this something that would be useful for researchers outside of strict ecosystem services e.g. distributions of particular species temporally and spatially? What do you think of their software?

I'm not certain I'm asking the right questions here, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on any of this if you have any time.

This is great, thanks for sharing.

Hi everyone! 

We've now posted Sara's session to our youtube channel, and I've also popped it up the top of this thread.

The collaborative notes worked really well! I've now updated them to capture what happened in the chat - it should be a helpful companion to go alongside the recording. The notes have links, projects, and key discussions we saw in the chat, and summarise the questions Sara coverd in the discussion as well as the Qs we weren't able to get to (40mins overtime was our limit!). If your question was one of the outstanding ones and you'd like to have it answered, please drop it in the discussion below. 

The notes now also have the participant check ins (such an awesome range of places, projects and interests!) - I'm sharing these as seeing what other people are doing might help you connect with each other. If you see someone you want to connect with, try and find them using  our member direcyour people tab. If you can't, email Ellie and she will see if that person is happy to hear from you before connecting you.

Reminder, registration is open for Carlos' tutorial next week: How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages? Register here.  

Thanks everyone! 

Steph 

Great talk! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some  high schoolers have done small AI projects(s) and have interest in the wildlife.
What resources would you all suggest to further develop high schooler’s interest in AI?