An attentive audience of 45 (including 6 on ZOOM) heard our guest speaker, Amelia Jeffery, an OFF grant recipient and PhD candidate, tell us about her research on dingos in the Myall Lakes region. Much of Amelia’s work involved discovering the various families of dingoes in the area. This entailed much travel within their territories setting up camera traps, then returning at various times to retrieve the images. Following that, she began the arduous task of sifting through thousands of photos to find the ones with dingoes on them.
Due to the fact that she had to set up the cameras close to the ground, she found that often the cameras were disturbed, or even stolen! After the images were collected, she then had to determine how to recognise the different members of the 4 or 5 families that call the region home. In this she was assisted by the use of Artificial Intelligence, but it was still a demanding task indeed!
You can listen to Amelia’s talk here. Note that the end of the video also includes discussion about GRC’s Biodiversity proposal.
More photos can be seen on Facebook.
PROMO
Amelia Jeffery, a PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney and an OFF grant recipient, is studying dingoes in the Myall Lakes region. She is investigating how dingoes navigate, behave, and interact in human-disturbed natural landscapes. Amelia uses GPS collars and camera traps to evaluate dingoes’ movement ecology and resource use to provide insight on fundamental behavioural characteristics of dingoes. Amelia seeks to use these findings to inform evidence-based management of dingoes and address gaps in the existing research.
This research investigates the population dynamics (including pack composition and distribution) and behavioural patterns of dingoes. Using camera trapping, she is also exploring the interspecific interactions (or lack thereof) of dingoes, cats, and foxes to assess how these three competing species navigate their shared landscape, both spatially and temporally.
This meeting will be held in the Oatley Uniting Church Hall at 7.30pm and on-line by ZOOM. The ZOOM link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3742141020?omn=86110187560 or open ZOOM & enter meeting ID: 374 214 1020.