If you're in mid-Canterbury and interested in nature and wetlands, note there's a public #BioBlitz happening on Saturday 18 February at Muriwai o Whata/Coopers Lagoon. That's on the coast between Te Waihora Lake Ellesmere and the mouth of the Rakaia River.

I'll be there, along with a bunch of other local naturalists and #iNaturalist fanatics, finding as many species as we can. It should be great fun. All are welcome.

https://www.ecan.govt.nz/get-involved/news-and-events/events-2022/bioblitz-at-muriwai-o-whata/

#BioBlitz #EcologicalSurvey #Nature #Biodiversity

Here's a taste of my evening's dance with Amazon's AWS Transcribe to get the audio notes from my afternoon's biodiversity run turned into text. I have a custom module in AWS Transcribe trained on about 70,000 previously transcribed notes. It now does good job of transcribing any note I throw at it. I've listed all the common errors it makes and have an R script that automatically cleans those up. Then it needs a light manual check to fix any remaining errors.
#WildCounts #EcologicalSurvey

After my weekly biodiversity run, I have a stack of observations to process. This afternoon I went 15.9 km and collected 878 species observations (all datetime-stamped and geotagged audio notes), took 480 photos, made 5 species audio recordings, and made a GPS GPX track and continuous AudioMoth audio track of the whole journey. I now drop the photos into #darktable for geotagging with my GPX track, and I drop the audio notes into AWS Transcribe to turn into text.
#WildCounts #EcologicalSurvey

I’m heading off for my weekly biodiversity run through the city, carrying just my usual essentials. There’s my microphone, monocular, a couple of cameras, an AudioMoth, my GPS, my iPhone, and my backpack with vials and plastic bags should I find something that needs collecting. :partyparrot: #WildCounts #EcologicalSurvey