Speaker: Lawrie Conole, " Augmented reality' - a field naturalist's view"
Dr. Lawrie Conole has been a dedicated naturalist since his 1960s Geelong childhood, eventually “book-ending” decades of ecological field work with a PhD in urban bird ecology. In the 1970s and 80s, he was at the forefront of biodiversity mapping in Western Victoria—including the Otways and Wombat State Forest—at a time when electronic bat detectors and harp traps were first arriving in Australia. Having conducted fauna surveys across every mainland state and served as convenor of the FNCV Fauna Survey Group, Lawrie’s “obsession” now continues in retirement.
Lawrie will tell us how he is currently documenting the fauna of the forests between Castlemaine and Daylesford, blending seasoned fieldcraft with modern augmentation from bioacoustic monitoring and trail camera technology. There’s much talk these days about how Al will replace us. Lawrie prefers the view that (i) the software that helps us trawl through thousands of hours of passive nature recordings isn’t Al, it’s just old-fashioned machine learning, and (ii) like a lot of other techno-fixes, it can be set up to help rather than replace us. Lawrie will give us his take on augmented reality and some machines and algorithms that are increasingly helping us as naturalists to find, identify and document what’s lurking out there in the landscape.
Observations: Members and visitors are invited to share their interesting observations at the meeting. Please email any photos to illustrate your report as uncropped JPEG file(s) to Jill Williams (jilliwill33@gmail.com) by noon on the day of the meeting.