Hello, I'm Michelle Tapper with the Latest from Science. Conserving our precious koalas
and Great Barrier Reef is a difficult job for scientists. Understanding the problems
and identifying them requires complex data management and analysis. Here to tell us more
about the new technologies being used is Academy Fellow Professor Kerrie Mengersen, a statistician
from the Queensland University of Technology.
Hi Kerrie, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Some people might be surprised
to learn that mathematicians are involved in conservation. How do you use statistics
to help predict population numbers?
Thanks for that question. So statisticians and mathematicians are involved in a very
wide range of areas. When you have the skills in maths and stats you can work across health
and industry and conservation. And in conservation, for example, we bring mathematical models
which describe the behaviour of animals and then the way that they live in their environment
and where they might live. And so we'd bring together these mathematical models and we
bring together the data and we can then describe the way that these animals live, the factors
that impact on their habitat and how they move through the environment. And then also
the kind of environmental factors, the human factors, the global change factors that will
affect their conservation into the future. monitoring koala populations and their habitat
is obviously vital to conserving the species. How do you use drones and virtual reality
to do that? The typical kind of data that we have from
conservationists and ecologists will be going out into the field and observing the animals,
but that's often very difficult. So you think of koalas in the previous, recent times when
we've had these terrible bushfires. And so we can't particularly go into those areas
or the animals might be cryptic. In other words, they hide from view. So trying to see
koalas in the forest or they might be in areas which are really inaccessible for people get
to. So instead we can use other forms of data to help us to understand where these animals
live and how many there are and the kinds of data that we can use are drones. So we
can fly over the area and we can either take photos or we can take thermal images to see
their heat signals and understand where they are. And we can use virtual reality. So if
we take images of the areas where these animals might live and then we can make immersive
environments and we can include experts in those immersive environments and ask them
'what are the characteristics of this environment that make it useful for the animal to live
in?'. And then we can take those characteristics and we can understand where those characteristics
or those pockets of environment might be across the landscape. And that's where we can predict
where the koalas might be. So we use the drones for the wide imaging area and we use the virtual
reality to get extra information. And we combine that with our observations to understand better
about predicting where the animals might be and how many there might be.
so you get all of that information and all of that data. How do those findings help with
conservation of koalas and inform decision making?
We can use the data that we're collecting from these different sources to create an
evidence base and that evidence based thing can be used by policy managers and by conservationists
to make better decisions. So we want to be able to use our statistics and our mathematics
to promote better evidence-based decision making.
you're also involved in projects that monitor the Great Barrier Reef. How on earth do you
collect data from something that is so huge? Ah, good question. So the Great Barrier Reef
is like 2300 kilometres long. It's huge. And there are areas of the rate that have been
monitored for a long time, very consistently by underwater divers taking images and taking
measurements, but they just pockets along the reef. And so we asked the question, well
how do we learn about the rest of the reef in those gaps where we don't have that kind
of information? Well, we've got a number of ways we can do that. We can use aerial imagery,
so flying over the reef, but we can also use information from divers. And so we think about
the, any number of divers that are out there on the reef taking underwater imagery. And
also we have underwater submarines that go along and take photos as well. So we can use
those images and imagine if we had this virtual reef online and you could take the images
and you could geotag them to the reef and then you can get automatic image analysis
to identify features of those images like coral cover or fish. And you can use citizens,
other people, to go into those images as well and annotate where the coral is. And in doing
that, we can extract the information from those images, combine it with these long term
monitoring sites and come up with a much better description or model of the health of the
reef. I'm glad you brought that up because you are
involved in the Virtual Reef Diver project, which does use citizen science, so how do
you utilise that data? Citizen science is a really important area
and growing in popularity and many areas of science are using this kind of information
from people. On the Virtual Reef Diver project we're using citizen science in two ways. The
first is to collect the images from divers who are taking photos underwater. And the
other is to ask people to go into the images and identify where there is coral, fish, algae
and so on. By doing that, then we're getting the images from the citizens, we're getting
the information about the images from other citizens. We're putting that together with
the scientific data and then we can create these much better predictions of the health
of the reef. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? And if somebody
wants to get involved in a citizen science project, is it as easy as just getting online?
Absolutely. So you can go to the Virtual Reef Diver site and just Google virtual reef diver.
There's also many other ways of getting involved in citizen science. So there's an Australian
Citizen Science Association. And what we can do then is we get that information from the
citizens and as we said, combine it with other data sources, from drones, from underwater
images, from acoustics, from microphone data. We can then, but what we do is not only just
get the data, but we need to then analyse it. And that's where the statistics comes
in. To be able to take those data. We make, extract the information from that. And then
we can develop mathematical and statistical models that describe the system in a way that
we can understand the important factors of those systems and also be able to make predictions
about those systems into the future. And that's so important for conservation where we have
rare and threatened animals, where we have areas that we can't actually access and we
want to be able to predict into the future, where we don't know what it will be like,
but with our mathematical and statistical models, we can make good predictions of what
the future might look like for these important animals that are so important for Australia.
And it's not just conservation that you use statistics and mathematical modelling for,
you're also involved in Australia's Cancer Atlas. Can you explain how that works?
The Australian Cancer Atlas is one of the world's first interactive online atlases.
So the Australian Cancer Atlas is one of the Australia, sorry. The Australian Cancer Atlas
is one of the world's first interactive online atlases. And again, we take our statistical
are spatial models and we look at different cancers across Australia, and we can show
the incidents and the survival rates for different areas across Australia for 20 different cancers.
So you can go online, search for the Australian Cancer Atlas, be able to zoom into the area
where you live and see the rates of cancer that are associated with your area and that
then compares to the Australian rates. So is it above the Australian rate, below the
Australian rate, with the kind of probability or how sure are we that it's really above
or below those rates. And this is really important for policy makers and health managers. Just
the same way that it's important for conservation managers and policy makers in the area of
ecology. And so although these are two very different areas, the mathematics and statistics
that we use are very similar. And so maths and stats really are tools that we can use
in very many different areas to solve really important problems of our world.
That's a lot of very interesting information and obviously it is of great benefit to many
different people. Professor Kerrie Mengersen, thanks for your time. Thank you. And don't
forget for regular video updates from the Australian Academy of Science, make sure to
follow us on social media.I'm Michelle Tapper, see you soon.