Citizen science is a bit of a buzz word, but what is it really all about?
Desert Discovery did not start out as a citizen science group, at first it was a group of nature lovers having adventures together. Over time the group’s focus has shifted more and more towards citizen science.
So, in this episode, we unpack what citizen science is and also how Desert Discovery became a citizen science group.
That’s what makes citizen science projects great, is when people can come together and learn from each other and you know, that real human connection basically.
The data at the other end is amazing too, as a scientist, but it’s not just about using people for their data collection, it’s about working with people. I think that’s where it’s gotta start.
– Ruby
Links:
ALA – Atlas of Living Australia
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Transcript:
Bevin: The word ‘citizen scientists’ is quite a new thing and everybody’s getting enthusiastic about it, but there’s always been citizen scientists, you know, way back, if you think of Banks and Wallace.
Allie: Like in gentleman scientists.
Bevin: Gentleman scientists.
Allie: They were self funded.
Bevin: Yeah. Or funded by rich people, if you like. Nowadays there’s lots of retirees who get into citizen scientists, like most of the people here. So there’s always been people who have this real interest in science at some level.
Allie Narrating: Hi, and welcome to another episode of Saltgrass. This is episode three in our series about Desert Discovery, and that was Bevin. He’s one of the team leaders of Desert Discovery, and he is a scientist and a citizen scientist himself.
In this episode, we’re gonna be talking about citizen science. It’s a term that has been thrown around across the last couple of episodes, and I just thought it might be worth expanding what exactly it means.
So in this episode, we’re gonna unpack a little bit about what citizen science is and also how Desert Discovery became a citizen science group.
Saltgrass theme music and standard episode intro:
A couple of years ago, my partner and I drove three and a half thousand kilometers from our home in Castlemaine, Victoria, across the Nullarbor and into the remote deserts of Western Australia. Our destination was a place called Yeo Lake Nature Reserve to join a citizen science group called Desert Discovery.
For two weeks we camped with them and each day was an adventure to see what life is out there in the desert. A treasure hunt for rare and obscure species. I took along my sound recorder and went on a treasure hunt of my own for stories about who these people were and why they were doing this. Season six of Saltgrass is still about salt of the earth people and grassroots change.
It’s just a bit further from home.
You can hear all episodes of Saltgrass on your podcast app or at saltgrasspodcast.com. Saltgrass is produced on Djaara Country, home of the Dja Dja Wurrung. Yeo Lake Nature Reserve is on central desert country where the Yuka people, the Sullivan and Edwards families, and the Ngaanyatjarra and Nangaanya Ku peoples have walked for thousands of years.
Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
Allie Narrating: So, as Bevin mentioned, the term citizen science is relatively new. It only entered the Oxford Dictionary in 2014. It was coined in the mid nineties and originally had a couple of different meanings, but it’s sort of come to generally mean: people who are not trained in the sciences, coming in and participating and helping collect data.
So the project might be designed and led by scientists, quality checked by the scientists involved, but people with no training can come on board and there’s many, many examples of this now across the world.
Some are conducted in person, like Desert Discovery and others are all online.
There are lots of apps now that people can contribute, sightings or evidence of whatever the subject matter is. So there are some that are looking at the night sky and people are observing what’s happening amongst the stars but most are grounded on the earth and have to do with animal and plant life, flora and fauna.
A couple of examples from Australia are things like a Wild Orchid Watch with an acronym ‘WOW’. Which is an app-based project that encourages participants to record native orchid locations, and that links to iNaturalist, which we’re also going to explore in today’s episode. There’s the Backyard Bird Count, which is a month-long event across October, where residents in Australia count birds in their local area. That’s become a really huge annual event now in Australia. Frog ID is another app that’s really popular, they have lots of recordings of frog calls and noises that you can listen to to see if it sounds like the frog you are hearing in your area. Because often you don’t see the frogs, you just hear them. And there’s even an echidna one called Echidna CSI, which is another app where you can log echidna sightings and collect scat for DNA analysis.
It’s also a really great way to get kids involved in science, whole families can participate in it. And it’s a bit of, I spy, let’s go for a walk and see what birds, you can see it can be really engaging.
Thomas: I think from my perspective, the most powerful aspect of citizen science is just the unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution that you get in terms of data collection.
Allie Narrating: This is Thomas. He was a PhD candidate at the time of recording and came along on the trip, and he’s a very enthusiastic advocate for citizen science.
Thomas: When you have professional scientists and researchers and data collectors, they just don’t have the time, the money, and the resources to be everywhere at once. Even for the places that they are going, they don’t have the time and money and resources to consistently go back to the same place to collect data over extended time periods.
One example, I was looking for Sturt Desert Pea records on the drive from Kalgoorlie to here to look at on the ALA, it’s the Atlas of Living Australia, and I found a few records from the 1920s and 1930s. And across that particular area I wouldn’t be surprised if they were, maybe not common, but not uncommon there, but there’s just so few records out there. So you’ll see that a lot, particularly in the realm of biodiversity data. You’ll go online, whether it’s the Atlas of Living Australia or other databases, and some of the records you get are just so old and it’s because the professional data collectors just haven’t had the time and just don’t have the money or the resources to go out.
Whereas when you have citizen scientists. You can pretty much pick any place in Australia, and there’s always gonna be someone that’s passing through, whether it’s on holidays or on the way to work, or they happen to live there. So now you just have this incredible situation where you can have someone collecting data in their backyard or on their property or in their local reserve or national park, and you have some people that go out every single day, every week, every month, every year for years on end, and just collecting data day after day after day.
That is just not possible to collect in any other fashion. And then you add in the spatial aspect as well. You’ve got those kind of people collecting data over and over, and then you multiply that across the whole country. And then from outside an Australian perspective across the whole world. And you’ve just got this unbelievable stream of data flowing in that just wasn’t possible 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Allie Narrating: Desert Discovery operates differently to how all these apps operate, but it is the same concept where people who are not trained in the sciences can participate in collecting useful data. You’ve already got an idea of that from our last episode with the botany team. Each episode I’ll be talking to a different team and you will hear how they collect their data, how they make sure that it’s useful, how to involve people who are not trained in the survey process and then where that data goes at the end.
So each team has a very different methodology and a different destination for their data as well. Desert Discovery does citizen science by inviting people out to these very remote locations in person and does a very condensed two or three week project every couple of years.
And of course, citizen science projects that have people gathering in person also use the apps. So on Desert Discovery, more and more people were using iNaturalist, which is a very popular, global app for recording data on species that people find.
And I asked Thomas to explain iNaturalist. It’s his favorite tool for data collection and citizen science, I think he’ll explain it better than I can.
Thomas: Yeah, so iNaturalist is pretty much one of, if not the biggest online biodiversity, citizen science platforms in the world. You basically go out and either take a photograph or a sound recording of any organism whatsoever, so no taxonomic restriction, You can even record bacteria and viruses and all kinds of wacky organisms if you like, and you upload them to the platform and then either you identify them yourself, if you already know what you saw, or you have the incredible community that is iNaturalist, the incredible global community, come along, identify your observations for you.
From there, once your observations are ID’d. That data gets exported to aggregating databases like the Atlas of Living Australia, or in a broader context, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. And from there it becomes usable, useful scientific data where researchers from around the world can use it in any which-way in any of their research At this point in time, iNaturalist data has been used in hundreds, if not thousands of scientific papers for everything from understanding spatial distributions, to looking at phonology to species responses to climate change, species discovery, you name it. Pretty much it’s been done and is possible.
Allie: So let’s go over in a little bit more detail how it’s reliable data. How is it that if I take a photo of something and I have no idea what it is, how does that become reliable data?
Thomas: Yep, that’s a great question. So one of the real key powerful aspects of iNaturalist is that community in terms of the experts who utilize iNaturalist.
So of course you’ve got many, many, many amateur naturalists who are keen observers but don’t necessarily know what they’re observing or don’t necessarily have that identification expertise. But the other aspect of the community is museum curators, researchers, taxonomist, and for many taxa are literally the world experts in those groups of organisms.
So as one random example, you’ve got a guy, Lee Windsor. He is pretty much the world expert on terrestrial flatworms, and he’s based up in Queensland and he’s the loveliest guy you’ll ever meet. You can post any photo of any terrestrial flatworm you find anywhere in Australia and he’ll ID it just like that for you and be able to give you a big explanation of all the characters he used to ID it, what photos you may need to take next time. Say he was only able to get it to genus. He’ll give you information on the ecology and whether it’s a distribution shift and things like that. So you just have this amazing community of experts where you get IDs and you go say, okay, this is really reliable because these are the kind of people who are also making IDs on museum or herbarium specimens.
The other thing I think that’s really important from the reliability aspect is that each observation is associated with evidence per se. So the photograph or the sound recording. So it’s similar to obviously a physical specimen that gets vouchered at a museum or a herbarium, but it’s evidence in front of you of what that person actually saw.
So in the past, citizen science records through other platforms. A lot of the times you wouldn’t need this evidence, so you could just submit a siding. So for eBird, for example, so eBird is obviously a fantastic platform and they have many ways of ensuring the data is reliable. But theoretically, I could go out right now for a walk and see a bird and record it as species X. But it might actually be species Y. I made a mistake and really if both species occur in that area, there’s no possible way of that data point being validated. It’s just not possible. If I said it was a magpie, but it turns out it was a magpie lark there’s no possible way for that data to be checked.
Whereas an iNaturalist, because you have that photo or that sound recording, even if you can’t necessarily say, well, yes, it is this species. You can definitely say, well, it’s not this species. And so you at least have that degree of confidence that you can eliminate some things and you can say, well, maybe I can’t ID it to species, but I can ID it to genus or family, which in some contexts is still very useful data.
Allie Narrating: So Bevin, who you heard at the top of the episode talking about gentleman scientists is the leader of the entomology team on Desert Discovery – that’s the insects or invertebrates team. We’re gonna look at them next time in episode four, and we’ll get a bit more of Bevin’s life story, but I just thought it was interesting to share a little bit here because it sort of describes the way citizen science can help grow you as someone who becomes more and more knowledgeable. There’s no barrier of entry to citizen science if you join projects that are guided and organized by scientific groups. But then hopefully it gives you a base of knowledge that can lead you to just start looking at the world in a new way on your own and pique your interest.
Bevin: Everybody can join in at some level. There’s the people who have the expertise to really increase people’s knowledge, but there’s also people that just have a genuine interest in a particular area that are developing their knowledge.
My botanical knowledge and my entomology knowledge started off at zero. I’ve learned along the way.
One of the things, when you get to my age, is that you learn that you can actually become an expert in just about any field. Because the process of learning is not actually about going to school, it’s understanding that you can get that knowledge from other people and from books and these days, from the internet. So anybody with a passion can actually develop that to an extent that they can be equivalent to the real experts in the field.
Allie Narrating: What I find interesting about Desert Discovery is that it wasn’t always a citizen science group. It started out with a group of people who are nature lovers and love taking notes and keeping journals and things, but I don’t think they saw themselves as citizen scientists as such. Coincidentally, the group started around the same time the term citizen science was coined, which is in the mid nineties.
If you look at the Desert Discovery website, they’ve got a page called ‘Projects’ and that lists all the projects that they’ve been on. You can click through and see all of the individual reports. And it’s really interesting because it gives you a real sense of how the group started and how it developed.
I’ll just do a brief summary of the origins of Desert Discovery and then I’ve got a couple of interviews with people who were there in the early days and hopefully you’ll get a sense of how a group like this can grow and emerge as a citizen science group, even if it didn’t start that way.
In 1994. Some participants of a nine day trek supported by Australian Geographic, ventured south from Edgar Range. Discussions followed this expedition regarding the possibility of a more detailed survey of up to three weeks
So two years later, that is what happened.
In the winter of 1996, over a three week period, 40 people visited a site called Pegasus in the Great Sandy Desert, 600 kilometers southeast of Broome. They looked at the desert, wildlife, vegetation, and early history. The expedition was called The Discovery Project as the base camp was situated between Joanna Spring and Discovery Well, near where two young explorers from the Calvert Expedition died in 1896.
Which interestingly was exactly 100 years before. And it’s really weird, it’s mind bending sometimes to think about what Australia was like. Just a hundred years before that, there were still explorers and pioneers heading off into the outback, and a hundred years before that, pretty much, there were no white people and aboriginal people had their country.
It’s only been 200 years. It’s extraordinary. So yeah, a hundred years ago, those two explorers died at the Discovery Well, and a hundred years later, a group of people with Australian Geographic were there with four wheel drives and all the modern conveniences of the 1990s.
The party included students and teachers from two schools, an archeologist, a linguist, three Aboriginal people, biologists, botany students, and an environmental engineer.
They begin the 1996 report with a description of where they were going. It says:
“The Great Sandy Desert has proven difficult to explore for the early explorers, as well as those that followed naturalists, prospectors at adventurers, the oil exploration companies, blazed tracks and seismic lines through the desert that provided some access for those that followed.”
And they have a map showing where in the Great Sandy desert they were, which is sort of, in the northern third of Western Australia. So a fair bit further north than where we were at Yeo Lake.
The Discovery Project created such a lot of interest that it was decided to try something similar in 1998 in another remote region. It was decided to set up an incorporated, non-profit organization to run this and future Desert Expeditions. So it was between the 1996 and 1998 projects that Desert Discovery as a group was created. But Desert Discovery do count the 1996 project as the first project that they did.
And I really appreciate that right from the start with Desert Discovery, they were really conscious about involving Aboriginal people. So the 1996 trip included some Aboriginal people who could share their knowledge of their homelands, but also they write in the report that they’re aware that the land around the project area was still significant to the Aboriginal people. And every effort was made to keep them and organizations which represent them, fully informed of what was planned. And obviously some were invited to come out as well and join them. So right from the start, Desert Discovery has worked with local indigenous people, and recognized that the country that they’re on is important to them and invited them to participate.
Bevin wasn’t at the original DD projects, but he did join pretty rapidly. He was invited by a friend of his called Speed who was one of the original members and he’s obviously been friends with a lot of them for a long time. So he has heard the stories of how everything started.
Bevin: It was more about exploration than anything else. And there was a pomy guy who brought some PhD students out from, I think it was Durham University or something, and Speed, who was working at a teacher, he took some kids along as well, or got them to travel somewhere and then picked them up, took them in the bush. And there were some Aboriginal people they took out as well, and plus a number of other people that came from various places, and they just went out to this particular place to find this spring, and I think they took some aboriginals with ’em because they hadn’t been out in that country for ages. They basically just wandered around for two weeks or so out there making notes. They wrote up a report, but individuals made their own little report of what they’d seen and what they’d done.Whereas now we’ve become a bit more scientific about things.
And then out of that, I think people decided that, ‘oh, this, this is a good lark. Why don’t we do it every two years?’ And so it’s been running. Yeah, every second year, since ‘96, somewhere around there.
I’ve met a couple of the other guys, and occasionally the original people get together and have a dinner somewhere.
I heard that it was invite only, but because I had pretty good knowledge of the botany out in the desert I managed to weasel my way into a team for a couple of years. My first one was Kiwirrkurra to Balgo. Which was at the bottom eastern end of the great Sandy desert.
That was fantastic. Fantastic. The scenery had a reasonable amount of rain through there, so we collected a boot load of samples and the guys found bilby up there and stuff.
A few years ago it was a little bit like that, bring your mates along and if you turned out okay, DD would’ve asked you to be a member. I mean, it’s still a little bit like that ’cause you don’t want people coming out here and just being yahoos.
Because we do a reasonable amount of work with the local Aboriginal community and we want to stay on their side. People do get a little bit vetted if you like. I think it’s probably gonna open up a little bit more now as the whole DD becomes more like a citizen scientist thing, rather than just people who like going out in the bush and seeing what’s there.
Allie Narrating: Another couple of people who were really early Desert Discovery members were Andreas and Christine and I didn’t actually meet them till near the end of the trip, and I don’t know how they kept so far under my radar, but they spent most of their time with the Tracks and Scats team and I didn’t walk with them until near the end of the trip.
Andreas and Christine are really interesting people. They’re a Swiss couple and they have been almost religiously coming every two years to every project, for decades. We’re gonna have a bit of a life story and exploration of these two in another episode as well, but for the minute I’m going to share what their experience of an early desert discovery was like
Christine: When it started with David, it was kind of very personal, you could call it.
Andreus: Yeah, yeah.
Christine: His friends mainly.
Andreus: Yeah. Yeah.
Christine: And his idea of bringing people from the city out into the desert. So they know something about the desert
Andreus: also, history and geology and, you know, astronomy and different aspects.
Christine: Yes. He wanted people from different areas of knowledge.
Andreus: Yeah.
Christine: But you know, the people from the city didn’t actually, well, that’s my impression, they didn’t come. Not that many. Mostly people who knew already about the desert, and they were very anxious to be able to go to the desert.
Allie: As someone who grew up in the city myself. I wasn’t confident camping even. I think you need to be an advanced camper to come out here. You can’t just have dabbled like you need to have done.
Andreus: No, you need to know what is going to happen to you. What could happen.
Allie: Yeah, it’s intimidating to be from the city and never have done it before.
Andreus: I remember the first time when we went camping with our children back in the seventies where we were a little bit afraid of snakes and try to hide when we were in the outback because we thought there might be somebody that might come and kill us, we heard about the murders that were going on. Germans killing other people,
Christine: Yes, that’s right.
Andreus: It’s totally different now.
Christine: Oh, even because we didn’t know about camels. Yeah. And one night, evening late Camel just came along, not far from us, maybe 20-30 meters, but we couldn’t see it. And all of a sudden we heard this gurgling noise. And it was very loud.
Andreus: We didn’t know what it is.
Christine: It didn’t have any idea what it was. So this was kind of scary.
Allie: So, at first, it seemed like it was more adventurous, and then you’ve seen it change in the last few years, is that right?
Christine: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Yes. It became more scientific collecting data, and I think this was a very good change. Yeah. Because before there was kind of two groups of adventurers. The one’s loving nature and at least looking at birds, vegetation and, and animals and so on. But the other group was a four wheel drive kind oriented group.
Yes. And they didn’t, how do you say, harmonise.
Andreus: I think there was some rupture.
Christine: Yes. So they were not really fighting, but it was a very hard discussion to find out what should DD do in the future. And so the nature people actually won this discussion.
Allie Narrating: So as you can hear, there were pivotal moments where Desert Discovery started to consciously choose to become a citizen science group. And over the years, they not only had to make that choice, but they had to develop their systems and learn how to become effective citizen scientists.
Marie and Graham Goods, you heard in the last episode about botany. They’ve been core members of the botany team for quite some years, and they were able to describe to me firstly how they got involved in Desert Discovery, which yet again involves Clive Crouch. And secondly, how they were founding members of the botany team. And finally how the botany team started to refine its processes and techniques to make sure that what they were collecting was actually useful for the herbarium, which was the final destination of all the data and the samples that they were collecting. And it was a learning process.
Maree: We were first invited to DD in 2000, and that was by a couple of people who were coming to DD and whom we knew quite well, but it clashed with when Graham was cropping, so we just couldn’t even consider it. In January, 2002, Clive Crouch was doing a mammal and reptile survey in the police paddock at Horsham, and Graham was camping there with him.
And he got talking about DD and we said, oh, we’d been invited, but we couldn’t go because of cropping. And then in the conversation he sort of said, ‘oh, it shifted from June now into September’. And it took us a while to register. Then we thought. ‘We can go!’ So we rang him a couple of months later and said, ‘Clive, could we go to DD?’
So he rang David Hewett, who was the president, and next thing we get an email from David saying, yes, we’re in. We could go. So that was how we first came to DD.
Graham: Of course, Clive dobbed us in as plant people, and the botany team wasn’t formalized really then. But that’s sort of the genesis of it anyway.
Allie: I heard that you guys started the botany team as a distinct branch of DD activity.
Maree: Yeah. Well, that was in 2002. We couldn’t go in 2004 because of cropping once again. Graham retired from farming in 2005, so we’ve been free ever since. So in 2006, which was up at Rough Leaf by this time, Keith Johnson was president and he said, I want you to lead a botany team.
But at that stage, we still weren’t really surveying formally. So there was probably about half a dozen of us, and we just wrote up a report of what we thought the plants were. Now whether we were correct or not, it’s another thing, probably not. Then 2008, we went to Horseshoe Bend in the Northern Territory, which was a station, and I thought, ‘oh, this has gotta be a little bit better than what we are doing’.
So I contacted the herbarium there and they put me onto the herbarium in Alice Springs. And so I spoke to a botanist there and she said, ‘oh, we’d be keen to come out’, because they wanted to look for a particular Acacia, Acacia latzii, which was very rare. So she helped me get a permit. And so we actually did do some collecting for that, and they were sent to the Darwin Herbarium. And the two botanists came out and we traveled with them and we found several more plants of Acacia latzii. So that was very exciting, extended the range of that.
Then 2010, which was Sykes Bluff on the Connie Sue Highway in Western Australia. Once again, I thought ‘this has gotta be better still yet’. And we were working with CALM that time, and so I spoke to CALM the lass there and she said, ‘yes, get your permits’, which I did.
And we did surveying more professionally than what we had done in the past, but we still weren’t quite up to scratch.
Allie: So gradually improving each time?
Maree: Yes, yes. Gradually improving.
Graham: We sort of fell into this because well before we knew about Desert Discovery, we’d been lovers of Australian plants, and we are longstanding members of the Australian Plant Society, and we’ve got a local group.
So whenever we went out, even locally in the bush, we’d be looking and photographing and collecting bits and pieces came to us naturally, we just weren’t as professional as perhaps the herbarium required.
Maree: And then the 2012, the Rawlinson Range one, I decided I was going to ring the Western Australian Herbarium direct.
And the timing was perfect because at that stage, their funding had been cut. They could no longer afford to send botanists out. And they said, we’ve been looking at finding a group of people who would do citizen science in surveying for us. So they gave us a document, a very simple document on how to collect.
And all of you know the data that was to be collected. They provided the books, they provided the presses, they provided the paper, they provided everything. And so we were up and running and it was such a success that that has continued since.
Allie: And so when you said CALM before that then became Parks, and that’s now DBCA.
Maree: DBCA yes. That’s correct. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Allie: Yeah. And I imagine it’s very satisfying for you to know that what you’re collecting is actually really being useful, adding to some body of knowledge.
Maree: Oh, it is because we’ve increased the range of several species. I think there’s been one or two new ones found in that collecting.
Allie Narrating: Marie and I were just talking about the DBCA, which is the Western Australian Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions.
A team from the DBCA joined us for a week of the project at Yeo Lake and they were really fun to have around. They were mostly young women and very enthusiastic to be there, which was so wonderful. We’ll meet more of them in future episodes.
But them joining us on a trip to Yeo Lake was quite an anomaly for Desert Discovery. It hadn’t really been done like this before. Most trips into the desert were done with consultation and permission from the Traditional Owners, and they were often on the lands of the Traditional Owners, which is quite restricted. So you do need to go through proper protocol and processes to get permission to be on their Country. And that also means that often those bits of country haven’t been surveyed in the Western scientific method, for a long time, if ever.
But this trip was a bit different. Because of the pandemic there were a lot of vulnerable people in aboriginal communities and they had decided broadly not to interact too much with other people until they felt like the pandemic had eased.
So the 2022 project was organized with the DBCA. It turns out they were really excited to work with Desert Discovery, and the citizen science efforts were really helpful for them because often their staff are thinly stretched over the vast landscape that is Western Australia.
It might be useful for me to spend just a minute explaining just how large Western Australia is.
It’s two and a half million square kilometers or 975,000 square miles if miles is your jam. It’s the second largest subdivision of a country in the world, it’s really the whole western side of Australia.
It stretches from the tropics up in the north where the Kimberley is, all the way down through all the deserts and down into climates, much like Victoria, which is really temperate and quite cold. And the ocean at the bottom of Western Australia looks directly out over many, many miles of ocean to Antarctica.
There are websites that can show you how large other countries are. It’s called Map Fight, and they show you one map on top of the other. So just the outline of a country, placed on top of the other to give you a concept of the scale of the two different places on the earth. It’s really cool. And for countries that have big states and territories, they do separate those out. So you can just choose Western Australia and compare it to anywhere in the world.
So, on the Map Fight website, it says that Spain is one fifth of the size of Western Australia. The Ukraine is about a quarter of the size of Western Australia.
The Nordic countries combined are about half the size of Western Australia. Afghanistan is a quarter of the size of Western Australia.
Morocco is about a fifth of the size of Western Australia, so five Moroccos would fit into Western Australia.
Chad is about half the size of Western Australia.
It’s 10 times the size of Wyoming in the US.
Texas is only about a third of the size of Western Australia, so you could fit three Texases into Western Australia.
Ecuador would fit into Western Australia 10 times. Chile is a third of the size of Western Australia.
Western Australia is about the size of one quarter of Canada.
I don’t know if any of these are giving you any context, but it’s really big. It’s bigger than most countries in the world, and it’s just one state in Australia and the majority of the state is desert. And not very inhabitable, which is why it has quite a small population size.
So with that in mind, when you have a Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions and they divide the state up into very large segments of land, they’ve got a huge remit. So they manage a lot of tourist sites like the zoos and, Rottnest Island (Wadjemup) and a few famous places like that. Then they also manage conservation across the whole state, including in really remote places like Yeo Lake in the Goldfields Region. And just one more comparison for you, the gGoldfields Region in Western Australia is larger than the whole state of Victoria. It’s 955,000 square kilometers. almost a million square kilometers just in the Goldfields Region.
Yeo Lake is near the top of the Goldfields Region, and it reaches all the way down to the coast of the southern part of the state. So the Great Australian bite and the Nullabor where we were driving when we first arrived in the state.
So this is Katherine talking about how Desert Discovery got in touch with the DBCA once they realized that the Traditional Owners were not open to having visitors during the pandemic, which was completely understandable. And so Desert Discovery was starting to try and find other means of accessing country and finding places that they could do some citizen science in a meaningful way.
So Katherine, who you’re about to hear, is who Desert Discovery we’re talking to about where they could go for the 2022 project. And keep in mind that the interview that you’re about to hear was recorded back in 2022 out at Yeo Lake.
Katherine: So I’m the conservation leader for the gold fields. I’ve been in the role for coming up two years. been in the gold fields for seven years. So my role in the regional leader role is that strategic planning for conservation on the ground. Putting those big departmental priorities – conserving and what species are priorities and all that sort of stuff, and putting that into what we can do on the ground and out on the reserves with our teams.
They got in contact with me being like, do you have any reserves that you want a project like DD, this flora, fauna, everything in between project happening and I was straight away I was like, ‘yes’. That’s one thing that we work on a lot in the Goldfields ’cause we’re such a massive area, we often have not expertise across the whole area.
So we lack that and resources and so to have people that are experts in their own right to come and give data in these remote areas is such a massive, massive resource that we can link into. And we’re trying to do that across the board. So wherever we can make those relationships, that is mutually beneficial to reserve management, data management, understanding what’s out here.
So straight away I was like, ‘yes, this is fab’. So they left me with being like, ‘where?’ And I was like ‘Oh, where?’ And so I started talking to people that used to work in the region, ecologists and being like, ‘what’s missing?’ Also, ‘where is somewhere that is good to get to, that people can stay?’ And Yeo Lake sort of popped up and again: really data deficient, haven’t been out here to do the flora or fauna probably since it got gazetted as a reserve. So it just had a lot of gaps. So, yep, Yeo Lake popped out.
And yeah, here we are, I guess. So that was the start and then I think it was, I don’t even know, a year or so of back to forward and all that sort of stuff of getting things together.
Allie: The gaps in the knowledge is something that’s really interesting to me. ’cause I think that’s part of why you’re valuing Desert Discovery coming out here. And I know we were looking at potential bilby sites today and that was very exciting because there’s not been any records of Bilby this far south since the eighties, for example. But that’s partly because no one’s out here taking records.
Katherine: Yeah, we have these massive gaps and a lot of our knowledge has to come from like consultants that are doing mining that we just don’t get out here and have groups like Citizen Science, that have expertise, whether it be their professional, their amateur, hobby. It is just amazing and they’re coming out here and it’s not even that they have this knowledge, but they want to share, not with just DBCA, either they want to share with all Australia. It is absolutely spectacular. And, you know, the next question’s like where to next? Like, and that’s just something that’s just amazing. I think that you can’t get anywhere that, that want to share data, I think is what you really get outta citizen science is that they are there for the conservation, the bigger cause.
Allie Narrating: So obviously in an ideal world, we wouldn’t be relying on citizen science to give departments like the DBCA vital data for their work. But also, it’s a wonderful thing given that departments like that will always be underfunded and governments will always be juggling priorities, that citizen scientists can fill those gaps and help departments like that have a better picture of what the country that they’re working on is like.
More specifically groups like Desert Discovery, that will physically go out to really remote locations, is a kind of citizen science that is not achievable just by using the apps.
So a lot of the apps like iNaturalist have a huge density of data from places where the human population is also dense.
So cities and urban areas get a lot of entries, and the more remote you go, the less data there is. So Thomas was really excited to start plugging in lots of data on the Desert Discovery trip into iNaturalist because he knew that there was a scarcity of data for the apps like that.
So the fact that Desert Discovery will organize people to go out into really remote desert landscapes and collect data is quite an unusual citizen Science Project.
The group is run by a committee of management. Everyone’s a volunteer. And the trip in 2022 had just over 40 participants, but other years they’ve had over a hundred people. And it’s a lot to organize to make sure that everyone’s safe, to make sure that everyone’s got the appropriate facilities and everyone knows what they’re doing. Especially when it’s really remote and you may have people who are not as experienced as others at traveling through deserts and in the outback of Australia.
I’d seen firsthand from how many meetings Nate was at, and the sort of things they were discussing, how much it takes behind the scenes to get a trip like this together. So I spoke to Colleen and Nate, Colleen’s the secretary of Desert Discovery, and Nate’s on the committee of management as well as being the team leader for mammals and reptiles. And just ask them what it takes to get it all together.
Colleen: So to start with, we pick an area and that’s usually done.
Through quite a few of our members that do recces and things like that. So in between our Desert Discoveries, we do a recce in an area that we think we might like. A lot of it so far has been on indigenous country, getting into remote communities and doing some base study work for those.
And then the logistics start – just getting our records and that up to date, and make sure everybody is safe out there. Lots of meetings. Lots of discussing things. So water is our biggest problem. There’s either gotta be water very close or on site tracks is another big issue with those sorts of things.
Yeah. There’s just lots of continuous stuff to do. I dunno what else you call it.
Nate: There’s, there’s always something. Nothing ever gets completely finished. You just sort of keep rolling along.
Colleen: You plan to do something, but you can’t do that until something else happens. So then you’ve gotta get back to that. So, very rarely does a committee meeting end with anything finished.
And it can change, especially with the indigenous communities, it can change a lot. Whether they want us in there, something could be happening where they say, ‘no, you can’t come in’.
So this one with the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions has been very easy getting their permission because they want this base data surveying done. So that’s been really quite handy. But still, you have your issues with water, and tracks, we didn’t know what the tracks would be like.
So people bring in camper vans and half caravans and tents and stuff. So we’ve gotta make sure that everybody’s safe while they’re out here. All our equipment that we bring has to be checked. And so there’s a lot of organizing to do.
We only have 44 participants. Yeah, so a smaller group than normal.
Allie: What’s a normal size?
Colleen: Around 60, I suppose.
Nate: There’s been as many as 120, I think, but that was quite a few years ago.
Colleen: That’s a long time ago. Yeah. This group’s a nice size group.
Nate: Yeah.
Colleen: This is manageable. And each team has their own team leader, which then is responsible for the participants in their team. So they do all the logistics and stuff like that to get them here.
Nate: Permits.
Colleen: So permits that takes the pressure off the committee so that sort of just spreads a workload. Botany and mammals and reptiles and entomology all have to have individual permits from the Western Australian government to actually check for little animals and reptiles and handle them. And for botany to pick plants and for. Entomology to collect bugs. That’s about it. And that’s a big job that they have to do to get those permits.
Allie Narrating: So after hearing all that, I just thought it would be good to get a sense of why they think it’s worth it.
Colleen: It’s just a great organization. We’ve met so many people from different walks of life and different jobs and different experiences, and it’s a real eyeopener and to become friends with a lot of them so quickly and so easily because we’re all like-minded. So I think that’s been a bonus for me staying in contact with a lot of people and meeting new people.
Because there’s new people coming to Desert Discovery projects all the time. Yeah. I love the traveling. Just coming to Western Australia so often is getting expensive. Yeah. So, another of our roles, I suppose, is to be looking for contacts to get into Northern Territory and South Australia and try and get some Desert Discoveries happening in there.
So always on the lookout, always asking, always trying to meet people and find some different areas to get into. I think that’s the best for me. I just love the socializing.
I love the campfires. I love hearing what people find, what they do all day and yeah, I think that’s the most I like about it.
Nate: Well, coming on a DD project provides a really unique experience, like you get to some of the most remote parts of Australia. That only a handful of people get to do. I know this is a public road and a public park, but not that many people really come here.
Allie: We had like 10 cars pull up this morning.
Nate: We did
Allie: with a bunch of people. But they only stayed 10 minutes
Nate: Exactly.
Allie: And then they left and they drive at speed.
Nate: Other than that, I think we’ve seen what three other cars?
Colleen: The motorbike group
Nate: and the motorbike group,
Colleen: but they’re on the Anne Burdell Highway For a destination. They’re not here to look and enjoy it and to know what’s here like we are. They’re here to go from Laverton through to the Stewart Highway and not see much in between, but they’ve done the road.
Nate: they tick the boxes and
Colleen: And that’s where Desert Discovery gives us the opportunity of b eing in these very remote places, and especially going into communities. You know, a lot of people just pass by and don’t know what’s in there, who’s in there, how important those people are that living communities with looking after the land and sharing their knowledge with us is a huge excitement for me. They’re just so knowledgeable
Nate: And on the whole, very welcoming and very sharing, you know, because you’re interested in their country and them, which most Australians aren’t really, sadly. And that’s something else DD is that ability to really know an area well.
And if you came here by yourself, yeah, you could probably get a similar knowledge. But the people here just give you that X factor because everyone’s so nice and so knowledgeable. We wouldn’t learn much about the plants or the insects or the fungi had not all those experts been here.
Colleen: And to be able to accumulate a group of citizen scientists that have so much expertise between them all, it’s just amazing what you learn and be amazed at what they know. And I think around the campfires and having people talk about their experiences and get to know where they’ve been and what they’ve done, otherwise, you just look at people and go, ‘hi, how are you going?’ But to get to know them and what they’ve done is sometimes amazing, what jobs they’ve done and where they’ve been. And it’s really good. I still feel a novice because I haven’t been to half the places they’ve been. Yeah. But yeah, no, it’s good fun and everyone’s so nice.
Allie Narrating: So I guess my takeaway on all of this is that it’s a really big job to do citizen science well, but when it is done well, it’s a whole heap of fun.
And it takes a lot of people who are really passionate and excited to be there and doing it. And fortunately there do seem to be a lot of people who are really keen to take part, whether it be, Bird Count that happens every October in Australia or any of the other apps, and especially iNaturalist – which people all around the world are using to document what flora and fauna and even, microbiology they can find, as Thomas described earlier.
I guess, I mean, not to get too sappy here, but I feel like it’s a real sign of how many people really love interacting with the natural world and value what they’re seeing and finding there. They take great meaning from participating in nature. And recognizing that humans now dominate the planet, we need to understand it. We need to understand what we’re doing to it and a lot of people care about that and they care simply to look at birds and look at insects.
And maybe it’s the child in all of us, that looks underneath the leaf and gets excited about a ladybug.
I don’t know. But people care and that gives me a great deal of hope. And then we have great brains putting it all together and making sense of it, and writing papers and doing PhDs and having careers based on what citizen scientists are plugging into all these apps all around the world.
A group like Desert Discovery is entirely run by volunteers, they’re not-for-profit, and they put in so much work for the entire two years between trips. The committee of management are working and it’s an incredible job that they do, getting a trip like this together so that other people can come out into the desert safely and also to collect meaningful data in a way that is useful to the institutions that they end up sending it to. It’s quite a feat and it’s obviously deeply valued by the people who loved Desert Discovery, because they keep coming back every two years and taking time out of their own lives, like Nate and I did. Taking time off work and driving, spending money on petrol, spending money on accommodation and food. But everyone loves it and it really is a great experience and it’s really great to be amongst other people who are so enthusiastic about what they’re seeing under every leaf, under every rock.
It was really interesting talking to the students who joined us on the trip at Yeo Lake, you know, they’re obviously really dedicated to science in lots of different ways in their study.
And quite keen for the more technological methods of citizen science. But, Ruby said something to me that I think speaks to the value of groups like Desert Discovery and what they do in terms of going out and working together as a team, even if it’s just for a couple of weeks, every two years.
Ruby: It’s a really nice community of people, basically. And I think that’s what makes citizen science projects great, is when people can come together and learn from each other and you know, that real human connection basically. The data at the other end is amazing too, as a scientist, but it’s not just about using people for their data collection, it’s about working with people . I think that’s where it’s gotta start.
Theme music and outro
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Links and notes about the show are on the episode page on the saltgrass website, saltgrasspodcast.com. Don’t forget to get your Saltgrass ethical t-shirts, tracksuit pants, and hoodies, and there is a new range created specifically for this season with lots of designs based around the animals and plants that were found out on this Desert Discovery trip.
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My name is Allie Hanly. Thanks for listening.
