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Citizen scientists helping CSIRO digitise Australian bee collection through online volunteering portal

Citizen scientists helping CSIRO digitise Australian bee collection through online volunteering portal

Image: Screenshot from DigiVol website

A blog post on the website of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia talks about a fascinating project to digitise the records of Australian bees, using digital volunteers.

CSIRO’s insect collection in Canberra holds over 50,000 bee specimens, each bee tells a part of the story of Australia’s more than 1500 bee species. The specimens collected all over Australia during the past 80 years show where each bee lives, how their distributions have changed over time, and what plants they live on and pollinate.

Bees are a critical part of any ecosystem helping pollinate plants and agricultural crops. Plants depend on animals, like bees, as well as other insects, birds and bats, who visit plants to feed, shelter or reproduce. They get pollen stuck to their bodies and move it en from male parts to female parts of flowers, enabling plants to produce seed. Both native plants and food crops face risks when their pollinators are threatened by habitat loss, pesticides, diseases and climate change.

The study of bees plays an important role in predicting future trends in pollinator abundance and activity and understanding what this will mean for both native our biodiversity and our pollinator-dependent industries.

To speed up research, CSIRO is in the process of digitising its bee collection and making the bee biodiversity data available worldwide. This involves high-resolution imaging of specimens and capturing metadata, the information associated with each specimen, like when and where it was collected and what plants were growing nearby.

Volunteers and students have joined the effort, speeding up the project and gaining skills in curation and digitisation. Citizen scientists are transcribing the bees’ specimen labels using the online volunteering portal DigiVol. DigiVol is a crowdsourcing platform developed by the Australian Museum in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia. DigiVol is used by many institutions around the world as a way of combining the efforts of many volunteers to digitise their data, in the form of museum object labels, field notebooks and diaries, recording sheets, registers or photographs.

Till date, around 36,000 of the bee specimens have been digitised, for a cost of around $1 per specimen. It’s part of a worldwide effort to understand bee diversity that includes partners such as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

The Australian Museum helped CSIRO to curate the bee collection. Bush Blitz, Australia’s largest nature discovery project is funding the project. BushBlitz is a multi-million dollar partnership between the Australian Government through Parks Australia and the Australian Biological Resources Study, BHP Billiton Sustainable Communities and Earthwatch Australia to document plants and animals across Australia.

CSIRO’s digitised natural history collection data, from bees to butterflyfish, is freely available worldwide through the Atlas of Living Australia. People who want to become digital volunteers can click here.

PARTNER

Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

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Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

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SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

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IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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