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TERN at ESAus20

With this year’s Ecological Society of Australia conference just started, we take the opportunity to highlight some TERN-related activities during the event.  Learn how to publish your research data via TERN; join the citizen science symposium, or Zoom into one of a number of exciting talks by TERN staff and stakeholders.

Understanding ecological extremes: mechanisms for recovery and resilience’ is the theme of this year’s annual online conference of the Ecological Society of Australia (ESA) from 30 November to 4 December.

The 2020 conference will feature a diverse range of applications of ecology that demonstrates the field’s contribution to our understanding of extreme events and their impacts on species, communities and ecosystems, developing theories and methods to enhance this understanding, and investigating mechanisms that enable resilience in a more extreme future.  ESA’s President Dr Bek Christensen says:

“This will be an ESA conference like none other in the society’s history! The ecological community has embraced the opportunity for a virtual conference, with almost 600 registered attendees so far and a full schedule of concurrent sessions, workshops, the poster session, and a number of social and networking events.

The virtual format means that competing commitments, travel, and even time zones aren’t a barrier to participation, and so we’ll even have attendees from all over the world, including Japan, Argentina, and Norway.

I know for many people the ESA conference is a treasured annual tradition providing a chance to hear about current research and connect with friends and colleagues. We hope that this year will be no different, and the conference gives everyone the chance to end 2020 on a positive.”

Dr Bek Christensen, ESA President

TERN is pleased to continue its long-standing affiliation with ESA’s annual conferences, and we are also delighted to announce that TERN has entered into a three-year sponsorship arrangement with ESA.  In addition to conference sponsorship, the agreement also allocates funds that will allow ESA to support an annual event for long-term research ecologists in Australia and the activities of the AusLTER community.

There are three specific TERN events during the week that we’d like to bring to your attention:

Workshop - Sharing your data through TERN Data Infrastructure

Tuesday 1 December 12:10 – 13:15. The workshop consists of a presentation followed by a hands-on tutorial on how to use TERN’s web-based SHaRED data submission tool to publish ecosystem research data securely in TERN’s portals. TERN’s SHaRED tool enables researchers to comply with ISO 19115-3 metadata standard, use domain-specific controlled vocabularies, use open license and assign DOI for their data to make them FAIR. Presenters: Dr Siddeswara Guru and Jenny Mahuika, TERN

Symposium - Citizen Science: a tool for ecology, conservation and science communication

Wednesday, 2 December. This symposium will showcase new tools, techniques and methods of citizen science data collection and analysis. Through different case studies, we highlight the benefits and challenges of different citizen science approaches and programs for building ecological knowledge, informing biodiversity management decisions, facilitating education, and fostering community engagement with nature. Convenors: Dr Katie Irvine, TERN and Dr Ayesha Tulloch, University of Sydney, University of Queensland.

Talk - Developing robust data management for ecosystem images

Wednesday, 2 December, 10:00 – 12:00. This presentation will highlight TERN’s web-based EcoImage platform that’s specifically designed to allow researchers to discover and access different image types collected at TERN ecosystem observing sites. The EcoImage platform includes a robust onboarding method to bring data from various sources into single storage using CloudStor and Apache Airflow workflow for automation. Presenter - Wilma Karsdorp, TERN

A number of presentations throughout the week describe advances in Australian ecosystem science enabled by TERN’s infrastructure.

We also highlight that our colleagues from Atlas of Living Australia are sponsoring ESA and presenting in Session 1 (Bernadette Duncan, KamilaroiBridging the gaps between traditional/western science to support Aboriginal women’s health, wellbeing, and empowerment); Session 6 (Dr Martin WestgateImproving the Atlas of Living Australia for ecological researchers); and Session 7 (Dr Erin Roger – Using citizen science to enable meaningful participation in bushfire recovery.

We look forward to seeing you online at this year’s ESA…

Not going to ESA this year? Don’t worry, you can follow all the action via Twitter using the hashtag #ESAus20 and by following @TERN_Aus.

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