News
We love to talk about the work we do and the projects we contribute to.
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Ka kite Aotearoa, begroeting Amsterdam!
Dragonfly team member Henry Zwart has relocated to the other side of the globe to study towards a masters of computational science at the University of Amsterdam.
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Silky shark populations in the Pacific may be recovering
Research presented at a recent Western Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) meeting in Manila suggests that silky shark populations in the Pacific may be recovering.
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From text to topics—thematic analysis in the age of AI
Many organisations have large amounts of written text. Thematic analysis allows the topics in documents to be summarised, clustered, and analysed.
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Mapping forests using remote sensing
Dragonfly team member Fabian Döweler, PhD, is mapping regenerating forests in Aotearoa with the help of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Catalyst Fund. The goal is to be able to monitor change in the forests in response to management, such as pest control, or after destructive events, such as fire.
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Rapid identification of avian flu viruses
Understanding avian influenza variants in New Zealand: a collaborative project between Dragonfly Data Science and the Ministry for Primary Industries
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Go fishing at the right time, in the right place
The ocean is changing, and the trade-offs involved with fishing are becoming more complex. Dragonfly director and fisheries scientist, Philipp Neubauer, is currently in the proof of concept stage for a new platform ‘Right Time, Right Place’.
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Ten years of northern bivalve surveys
Earlier this year, Katrin Berkenbusch along with Tyla Hill-Moana, Emma Crawford, a team of field assistants, and local hapū completed ten years of summer cockle and pipi surveys in northern North Island.
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Kindred spirit joins our team
Nokome Bentley joined Dragonfly as a principal data scientist earlier this month. He has many years of experience in fisheries science, data analysis and software engineering.
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Learning tech makes a difference
Dev Academy Aotearoa is a training institution that offers a 17-week hands-on coding course. A couple of our staff have benefitted from the course, which has allowed them to move onto a new career path.
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Interactive map shows community impacts of adverse weather
Our work with the Social Wellbeing Agency produced an interactive map of cyclone impacts overlaid with infrastructure and demographic data.
Explore Cyclone Gabrielle Impact Map
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We support safer cycling in Wellington
Cycle Wellington is calling on local businesses to offer their support for Paneke Pōneke – Wellington City Council’s bike network plan. We’re all for it!
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Celebrating our Welly Award finalist
Finlay Thompson is a finalist in the business category of the 2022 Dominion Post Wellingtonian of the Year Award. The awards recognise individuals who are making significant contributions to the Wellington region.
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Cyclone Gabrielle flooding - North Island data released
An initial map of flooding in Hawke’s Bay used synthetic aperture radar data from a snapshot taken on Tuesday 14 February 2023 during the cyclone. It was updated with information collected on February 19 and 21, which showed the extent of silt and slips in the region. A further update shows impacts over the whole North Island.
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In-house innovation creates more useful, beautiful maps
Frustrated with the limitations of current web mapping software, Dragonfly’s digital cartographer Ian Reese set about making something better. Now this new method is being rolled out to our clients.
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Welcome Teresa!
We are delighted to welcome Dr Teresa A’mar to Dragonfly. She has an impressive background in fisheries science, software development and statistical modelling.
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Dr Kim takes a trip to Korea
It’s been nearly 5 years since Kyuhan Kim left home to study for a statistics PhD in New Zealand. In that time he has become a Dr and worked at Dragonfly as a fisheries scientist for a year.
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Argentinian collaboration extends seabird risk assessment
Maximiliano Hernandez from Argentina recently spent 2 weeks at Dragonfly to begin the first seabird risk assessment for species from his country.
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Pāua abalone science update
Philipp Neubauer was one of a handful of New Zealand pāua industry representatives, scientists and fisheries managers who met with their Australian counterparts at an abalone workshop in Hobart recently.
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Growing our design team
We welcomed Kusal Ekanayake to Dragonfly in August. His appointment is in response to a growing amount of client work, and recognises the importance of good design in our finished products.
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Exceptional PhD opportunity for Caleb
The right combination of people, research, support and timing has enabled Caleb Moses to head to McGill University in Montreal to study natural language processing.
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Working from everywhere
After a long wait, many Dragonflies are enjoying the opportunity to catch up with family and friends around the world. Most of the travellers are choosing to take their work with them.
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Introducing The Kahawai Collective
A new not-for-profit organisation – The Kahawai Collective – was launched earlier this month with directors Adam Langley, David Middleton and Finlay Thompson raising a celebratory toast.
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Nuclear war would cause Little Ice Age
Dragonfly’s Philipp Neubauer was part of an international team of scientists that researched how a nuclear war would affect the world’s marine environments. Their work was published today.
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Going for gold
We’re finalists in the technology category of the Wellington Gold Awards this year. Previous winners in this category were Volpara (2020), Sharesies (2019) and CatalystIT (2013).
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Dragonfly contributes to global COVID-19 response
AudacityInstant is an interactive genome sequence analysis webtool developed by Dragonfly for GISAID.
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Catching birds on film
Having video cameras on fishing boats to detect accidental captures of seabirds isn’t a new idea. It’s potentially a very useful, cost-effective way to supplement or replace the use of human observers on vessels, and increase coverage across a fleet.
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Au revoir Laura
After nearly 4 years as a fisheries scientist at Dragonfly, Laura Tremblay-Boyer recently moved to Hobart to take up a role at CSIRO.
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Wellington stopover for Cambridge-bound student
Amelia Cordwell is contributing her data science skills at Dragonfly before heading to England on a Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial PhD scholarship.
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Students visualise bird data
The numbers of seabirds found dead on beaches across the country is a large collection of records managed by Birds New Zealand. It proved to be an interesting dataset for user experience design students from Victoria University of Wellington to try out the skills they’ve been learning.
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Going solo on carrots, apples and some flapjack
McKenzie Tornquist says going on an Outward Bound course was the best thing she’s ever done in her life. The challenges she experienced while tramping, kayaking, swimming, cooking, running and sailing proffered many lessons that she’s already applying to her everyday life and work.
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Pūhoro intern digs into data analysis
Hayley Wikeepa is working at Dragonfly this summer as an intern from Pūhoro STEMM Academy.
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Linking with other independent research organisations
Dragonfly Data Science is now a member of IRANZ, the Independent Research Association of New Zealand. The association promotes connections between member organisations and with government.
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RSI report published, and it’s beautiful
The Minister of Research, Science and Innovation Megan Woods, has launched a ‘state of the nation’ report on the performance of New Zealand’s research, science and innovation system.
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Shellfish monitoring—2021 and beyond
A new contract with Fisheries New Zealand will see our work surveying pipi and cockle populations across northern North Island beaches continue for another 3 years.
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Kākāpō conservation on Whenua Hou
Emma Crawford spent 2 weeks on Whenua Hou volunteering with the Kākāpō Recovery Programme.
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Climate change and the treelines of the Southern Alps
How much longer will New Zealand’s abrupt treelines hold out against global warming?
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Welcome to Rochelle, our office manager
We’re excited to welcome Rochelle Dalziel as she takes up this new full-time role at Dragonfly.
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Our sparkly new website takes off
Video footage shot from a drone above Cuba St’s rainbow crossing was one of the finishing touches for our new website, which went live today.
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Recognition for genomic scientists' work in COVID response
Dragonfly has a long-standing association with Genomics for Aotearoa New Zealand (GFANZ) and last week hosted a celebration for four inaugural fellows.
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Machine learning and deep learning
Kiarie Ndegwa recently joined Dragonfly from CSIRO in Canberra, Australia, where he used machine learning techniques in diverse settings to solve large, messy data problems. Here, he explains the basics.
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One Dragonfly, three owners
In November 2020, Edward brought in Finlay Thompson and Philipp Neubauer as fellow directors. Finlay is now also the chief executive, responsible for the day-to-day management of the company.
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Fish are not like trees
Kath Large joined the Dragonfly team in February as a fisheries scientist. She says fish are really hard to count because unlike trees, they are hidden underwater and move around all the time.
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A Christmas bioblitz
Tim McNamara organised a different kind of Christmas function for the Dragonfly team this year – a bioblitz from the office in central Wellington. He was very surprised at what they found.
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Ocean love brings Tyla and McKenzie to Dragonfly
Two newly minted marine biologists are the newest people to join our crew, having been recruited to work on marine and Māori language projects.
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A big welcome back to Tim
In the space of 12 years, Tim McNamara has worked as a developer and data scientist, created multiple start-ups, got a Master’s degree, written a book on programming and begun giving online software tutorials. Now he’s re-joining Dragonfly to get back to data science and knowledge creation.
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Shellfish, sediment and data science
Dayanitha Damodaran has recently started at Dragonfly, where she is working on a range of projects related to shellfish, including ongoing research with the Pāua Industry Council and annual bivalve surveys in northern New Zealand.
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Philosopher Brett joins the Dragonfly crew
We’re delighted to be able to welcome Dr Brett Calcott to the Dragonfly team from mid-July. Brett will be based in Auckland and visit Wellington regularly.
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Welcome to the team Iggy!
Dr Ignatius (Iggy) Menzies is set to become a Dragonfly at the end of July, in a new role to promote, support and implement reproducible research with our clients.
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Celebrating World Albatross Day!
In this retrospective to mark the day, Edward takes a look at some of the work he and Dragonfly have done to understand and protect these superb birds.
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We're still here
Aotearoa New Zealand is about to go into lockdown for 4 weeks to contain Covid-19. Although our office is shut, we’re all well and are working from home for the duration.
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63 days to walk 1350 km
Looking tanned, happy and ridiculously fit, Edward is back at work after walking the South Island half of Te Araroa – New Zealand’s trail.
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Data science and life insurance
Montoux is a Wellington-based business that works with life insurers globally to raise their performance. The company’s software uses data science and actuarial science to help insurers understand and monitor their markets.
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Bird of the year data
The hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin, took the 2019 crown in the New Zealand Bird of the Year competition, but what about all the other birds? Forest and Bird have released data on the votes cast, so that you can explore the voting in detail.
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Partnership for Papa Reo
Te Hiku Media, supported by Dragonfly, have received an investment of $13 million through MBIE’s Strategic Science Investment Fund to develop a multilingual language platform, Papa Reo. Papa Reo will develop natural language processing tools, starting with te reo Māori.
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Oceanic whitetip shark stock assessment
Laura Tremblay-Boyer led a Dragonfly assessment of oceanic whitetip shark populations in the Pacific Ocean for the Western & Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). She presented it to the commission in August.
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A developer with design eyes
When he first met Dragonfly, Simon Winter was a developer with design agency Salted Herring. Now he’s joined the team as a front-end developer.
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Documenting indigenous perspectives on AI
Caleb Moses joined indigenous artists, writers, technical experts and academics in Hawai’i, as a follow up to the AI workshop he went to in March.
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Oreti Beach toheroa report published
Dragonfly surveyed the population of toheroa (New Zealand’s largest bivalve) at Oreti Beach near Invercargill in 2017. This followed an earlier survey in 2014. The beach supports one of New Zealand’s main toheroa populations and is the only substantial one in the South Island.
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Old data, new story
When Katrin Berkenbusch was doing post-doctoral research in 2002, she collected data from three estuaries in Otago and three estuaries in Oregon, in summer and in winter. The project was investigating the possible influence of two different ‘ecosystem engineers’ on the other animals in these habitats.
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Creating virtuous circles of data
Sponsorship from Dragonfly is helping volunteer Wikimedian Siobhan Leachman get to a conference in the Netherlands later this year.
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Data science student joins our team
Nikki Wilkinson recently started working at Dragonfly part time while in her third year of a BSc, majoring in maths and statistics. She could also be Victoria’s first student to graduate with a minor in data science.
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Indigenous protocols and artificial intelligence
Caleb Moses recently spent time in Hawaiʻi at a workshop exploring the relationship between indigeneous protocols and artificial intelligence, as part of a New Zealand group led by Peter-Lucas Jones and Keoni Mahelona from Te Hiku Media.
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Southern Hemisphere seabird bycatch estimated
An international team of scientists recently completed a comprehensive analysis of seabird bycatch in Southern Hemisphere tuna surface longline fisheries. It was carried out at the final workshop in a multi-year Common Oceans ABNJ Tuna Project run by Birdlife on behalf of the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
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Open data for a global audience
Dragonfly hosted a Wikidata masterclass with Asaf Bartov from the Wikimedia Foundation in late November. He was accompanied by Dr Mike Dickison, currently the New Zealand Wikipedian at Large.
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Cherie joins us for the summer
Mechatronic engineering student Cherie Vasta, from the University of Canterbury, is working as an intern at Dragonfly until February. Her project, machine learning for te reo Māori, is with Te Hiku Media and run through the Te Pūnaha Matatini summer internship programme.
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Chilean partnership for albatross risk assessment
Luis Adasme, an analyst from the Chilean fisheries research institute IFOP, was hosted by Dragonfly for 5 weeks to create the first seabird risk assessment for Chilean fisheries.
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Artificial intelligence for fisheries management
Our new meeting room was bursting with New Zealand machine learning and fisheries experts on Wednesday for a workshop led by David Middleton, chief executive of Trident Systems.
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Family calls Caleb north
Caleb Moses is moving back to Auckland next week, and taking Dragonfly with him.
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Streamlining the National Monitoring System
Our work with the Ministry for the Environment helped streamline the data collection, management and storage aspects of the National Monitoring System. The NMS monitors all the resource consents issued by councils around the country. A spreadsheet-based analysis system was shifted to using R, reducing the work that needed to be done by MfE to collate the data.
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Risk assessment for world’s largest fish
A report assessing the risk to whale sharks from fishing in the Pacific Ocean was presented to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) Scientific Committee meeting in Korea last month.
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Untangling complex patterns of work
A challenging problem applying the Holidays Act to the employees of a large company led to Sentio and Dragonfly working together.
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Bienvenue Laura
We’re delighted to announce that Laura Tremblay-Boyer has been appointed as our new fisheries scientist and will start in September. She has spent the last 3 years as a stock assessment scientist with SPC in Nouméa, New Caledonia.
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US fish stock assessments reviewed
Phil Neubauer recently published an analysis of the factors that lead to fish species being formally assessed in a stock assessment process. The work involved several collaborators from the United States including NOAA Fisheries, the government agency responsible for the stewardship of the country’s ocean resources.
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Deep learning language
Developer and data scientist Miles Thompson recently started working with Dragonfly on the Te Hiku Media Kōrero Māori project – applying machine learning to transcribing spoken Māori.
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Ngā mihi ki a Caleb
Caleb Moses is all set to join Dragonfly later this month. He will bring valuable experience in machine learning, natural language processing, data analysis and data visualisation to the company.
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Shout out to Kaicycle
A new, more spacious office has enabled Dragonfly to get set up with systems to recycle plastic and paper waste and to compost fruit skins and food scraps.
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An albatross album
During the move towards a paperless office, Elis digitised Edward’s slides from a trip to Campbell Island in 1996 and shared them on Flickr. The album has adorable images of fluffy albatross chicks at the Bull Rock colony.
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Sharing science across the Pacific
Dragonfly is sharing its analysis methods and data with scientists in Japan to build a more complete picture of seabird bycatch in Southern Hemisphere fisheries.
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Curiosity uncovers election hack
Routine monitoring of the Bird of the Year election by Yvan Richard uncovered fraudulent voting in the competition last week. The discovery was picked up by media worldwide and “ruffled a few feathers” in New Zealand as well.
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We’ve moved (but not very far)
Dragonfly Data Science is now located on level 4 of 158 Victoria St, instead of level 5. “It’s a floor down but a size up, so we now have a dedicated meeting area and our own kitchen, as well as more desk space,” says Edward.
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Keeping track of Kākāpō
Kākāpō, New Zealand’s large, flightless, nocturnal parrots generate few offspring but much data. The whole population of about 150 birds is intensively managed and monitored on several pest free offshore islands. The birds’ weight, breeding and mating activity, and blood and poo sample results are currently recorded in a database that has to cope with increasing amounts of data.
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Protected species captures in New Zealand fisheries
The latest estimate of the number of seabirds caught in New Zealand’s fisheries has been released by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). The protected species capture data for the year ending September 2016 is now available via a Dragonfly website.
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Data science + genomics
Genomics, the study of genomes (the complete set of genetic material within an organism), is a relatively new field of science that is generating vast quantities of data.
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A little story about Dragonfly
Edward gave a talk called ‘Growing your own science organisation’, at the New Zealand Association of Scientists annual conference on 21 June. He personalised the presentation by using only photos from his phone.
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Sharing our best practice
Plant & Food Research is hosting a two-day conference later this week, where Finlay Thompson will talk about Dragonfly’s commitment to reproducible research.
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Seabird champions meet in Vietnam
Edward Abraham represented New Zealand at a workshop aimed at combining efforts to reduce seabird bycatch in the world’s tuna fisheries. Held in Hoi An, this was the second pre-assessment workshop organised by BirdLife South Africa, one of the partners of the Common Oceans ABNJ Tuna Project.
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Oreti Beach toheroa survey
Concern over the fall in juvenile toheroa numbers reported in Dragonfly’s 2013 survey prompted a follow-up survey of Oreti Beach this summer. The survey was funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) with co-funding from Waihōpai Rūnaka, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, Environment Southland, the Department of Conservation and Invercargill City Council.
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Farewell Chris Knox
After four years and two children, Chris is leaving Dragonfly to take up a position as a data journalist at the New Zealand Herald, based in Wellington.
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Tooth and Claw snags young locals
A website created by Dragonfly to record observations of pest animals on Otago Peninsula was given the thumbs up by local children after a busy spring. The project, Backyard Biodiversity, saw children monitoring pests around their homes and schools and recording it on the Tooth and Claw website.
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Helping save turtles in the Pacific
Dragonfly provided technical support to a workshop convened by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) under the Common Oceans Tuna Project, which met in Hawaii recently. The group was considering which mitigation methods would be most effective at reducing bycatch for sea turtles, but lacked a reliable map of turtle abundance.
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Kōkako among supreme winners at annual Best Design Awards
The Kōkako application was awarded a Purple Pin at the 2016 New Zealand design awards held last Friday night in Auckland. The award recognised Kōkako as the best entry in the interactive application category, including websites and mobile applications.
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Kōkako featured on Native Affairs, Māori Television
The Māori language software Kōkako features on Native Affairs and is in the running for a New Zealand design award.
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Dragonfly’s remote southern office
Fast electronic communication with the team in Wellington and good workflow processes enable staff member Dr Katrin Berkenbusch to live and work happily from her home on Otago Peninsula.
“I feel like I live in paradise! I think the peninsula is a really special, beautiful place. I enjoy the wilderness of nature here but also access to a city in close proximity. It’s the best of both worlds,” she says.
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A sabbatical in Denmark
Philipp Neubauer has just headed off to spend a month in Denmark working on his Marsden Fast-Start project. The attraction goes beyond the European summer and historic castle setting, to a research collaboration that could help New Zealand fisheries build resilience to climate change.
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Machine learning in the cloud
Edward has been invited to talk at a Catalyst Cloud breakfast about how Dragonfly’s Kōkako technology makes use of the cloud computing platform. Kōkako uses machine learning to monitor the proportion of Māori language broadcast on New Zealand’s iwi radio stations.
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Pest monitoring by curious minds
Dragonfly has combined forces with the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group to teach primary-school children how to monitor pests in the Dunedin area.
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Mapping the cadmium in New Zealand soils
In a project for the Fertiliser Association Industry of New Zealand, Edward mapped the cadmium content of 1980 soil samples from across New Zealand. He found clearly elevated concentrations in Taranaki and Waikato.
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Shellfish surveys – a smarter approach
Beaches in northern New Zealand have been monitored regularly for cockles and pipi (bivalves) since the early 1990s. Dragonfly took on the surveys two years ago and has now also completed an analysis of all the data collected from the 12 beaches in the past 15 years.
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Include Regional Economic Activity charts in your website
Chris built a nifty feature into the website for the Regional Economic Activity Report (REAR) that lets you embed selected maps or charts into your own website. The embed feature has been used by New Zealand Herald in the data insights pages.
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Latest regional GDP data added to the Regional Economic Activity Report
New Zealand’s regional gross domestic product data, for the year ended March 2015, are now available via the Regional Economic Activity Report (REAR) website developed by Dragonfly.
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Report back from eResearch 2016
A highlight for Finlay of the recent Queenstown eResearch conference, was hearing the wider research community endorse the value of the principles and methods that are central to how Dragonfly operates.
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Shellfish surveys show beach closures are working
Annual cockle and pipi surveys of 12 beaches in northern New Zealand show that beach closures are effective at halting declines in cockle numbers.
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Overlap between black petrel and fisheries
Dragonfly has published a report estimating where the range of black petrel overlaps with commercial trawl and longline fisheries in northern New Zealand. The greatest overlap with fisheries is on the shelf edge to the north of Great Barrier (Aotea) Island.
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Kei hea koe?
Where are you? Kei Pōneke au! I’m in Wellington! Weekly lessons in te reo Māori are happening at Dragonfly at the moment.
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Theo's eggs
Philipp Neubauer keeps the Dragonfly staff supplied with eggs from his lifestyle block in the Wairarapa, about an hour by train from Wellington.
His son Theo, aged “four and three quarters”, decorates the boxes with his drawings of spaceships, roosters, eggs and Pippi Longstocking.
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Working out who's eating who
A statistical method for analysing predator-prey relationships was developed by Philipp Neubauer. The method will be used to study the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on marine ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico. The approach was developed collaboratively with Olaf Jensen, at Rutgers University, and Olaf is continuing to expand the use of this analysis.
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Author prediction win for Douglas
Dragonfly associate Douglas Bagnall recently won a software competition to correctly predict the author of 100 or more pieces of text in each of four languages. The evaluation lab competition is run annually as part of the PAN conference, (plagiarism, authorship and social software misuse). In 2015 there were 18 entries, including some from large university research groups.
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New website for Dragonfly
Dragonfly launched a new website in September, which incorporates its updated brand Dragonfly Data Science.
“Although we’ve been using the brand on our printed reports for a while already, this is the first time its been used on our website. We chose ‘data science’ because it’s a broad term that captures the whole range of what we do,” says Finlay.
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Kōkako for language monitoring
Dragonfly’s innovative technology to digitally monitor the proportion of Māori language broadcast on radio and television has been branded as Kōkako.
A rare New Zealand songbird, the kōkako (core-kar-coh) has an evocative flute-like call, as its onomatopoeic Māori name suggests. Edward felt the sound quality of the word, as well as the bird’s uniqueness, was right for their successful world-first project.
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The Regional Economic Activity Report gets interactive
Dragonfly has created an interactive web tool to present information on population, employment, GDP and annual household income across the country’s 66 territorial authorities for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
It is available from the MBIE website in desktop and tablet versions, and an app is planned.
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Dragonfly featured on ABC and BBC radio programmes
Dragonfly’s work for the Paua Industry Council, using data loggers to manage the pāua fishery, was featured on the ABC’s Off Track and the BBC’s Discovery programmes this week.
Edward, along with Dave and Jason Baker, discuss the development of the data loggers and the benefits to the fishers. This programme is part two of a four-part series exploring current marine issues around the world.
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Working at the beach this summer
Dragonfly are surveying cockle and pipi populations in the wider Auckland region and toheroa in Southland for the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).
The work in northern New Zealand is currently underway, with Katrin leading the project. “I’m a soft-sediment ecologist so it’s a good opportunity to get into this kind of work and make use of my skills. We’re sampling a range of beaches, inlets and estuaries, from the Bay of Plenty to Whangarei.”
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The BBC and the ABC come to town
Julian Siddle from the BBC Radio Science Unit and Joel Werner from the ABC visited Dragonfly last week, to record interviews as part of a radio series on the marine environment.
The four 25-minute programmes feature positive stories about people who are solving problems using science and data-driven approaches.
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Seabird counts around fishing vessels
New Zealand is a global centre of seabird diversity, with more than 80 species breeding either on the mainland or on offshore islands.
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Philipp presenting at the Oxford University Biodiversity Resilience symposium
Philipp is off to Oxford on Monday to present on the resilience of fished populations at the Biodiversity Resilience symposium. Phil’s talk is entitled: The end of the line? Patterns and mechanisms of resilience in overfished stocks.
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Inferring animal dispersal from geochemical proxies: open source R package online
To pinpoint the origins of settling fish in Cook Strait, near Wellington, Philipp measured geochemical signatures in fish otoliths (ear bones). A new Bayesian modelling approach allowed him to estimate dispersal of larval fish among local populations in the region. These models are now available in an open-source package for the statistical computing environment R.
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Podcast - bycatch data analysis
Edward and Finlay talk to Alison Ballance from Our Changing World, Radio New Zealand National about their analysis of seabird and marine mammal bycatch data collected by observers on fishing vessels.
The data informed the Ministry for Primary Industries’ National Plan of Action for Seabirds 2013, which aims to ensure that ‘New Zealand seabirds thrive without pressure from fishing related mortalities, New Zealand fishers avoid or mitigate against seabird captures and New Zealand fisheries are globally recognised as seabird friendly.’
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Taiaroa Head colony perfect for albatross study
The northern royal albatross colony at Taiaroa Head has been used to estimate the birds’ survival rates at different ages in a single model. The new estimate by Dragonfly updates the survival rate calculation from 1993, which was based on re-sighting data from 1937–1993.
Since then, a number of things have changed – climate and marine conditions, population size and the distribution of fishing effort – and better analysis methods are available.
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Resilience of the world's fish stocks
Philipp Neubauer, who is due to start work at Dragonfly in August, has published a paper modelling the recovery of the world’s fish stocks from overfishing in the journal Science this month. The full paper may be accessed via the publications page of the RAM legacy stock-assessment database.
“We found that marine fish populations were surprisingly resilient to overfishing and could generally rebuild to sustainable levels within a decade or so – if fishing was reduced substantially at the first signs of overexploitation,” he says.
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Seabird bycatch data goes public
Fisheries observer data on the capture of seabirds in New Zealand trawl and longline fisheries from 2002–03 to 2010–11 have recently been made available through a web interface.
The website was developed by Dragonfly for the Ministry for Primary Industries and is searchable by year, species, region and fishing method, with results displayed in a clear graphical format.
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Like some talk with your sushi?
Last week we held our first official lunchtime technical talk. We started the series to connect with others in Wellington who are interested in the same kind of ‘bright and shiny things’ that interest us. The next talk will be by Joel Pitt who will give a ‘Beginner’s guide to information theory’, on February 28, starting at 12:15.
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Doing our bit to reverse the brain drain
Christopher Knox recently joined the Dragonfly team as a visualisation scientist. Originally from Christchurch, he spent 10 years overseas, most recently in Saudi Arabia.
Although Chris and his wife were planning to return to New Zealand eventually, the offer of a job with Dragonfly was the catalyst they needed to make the move home.
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Joining the dots for pāua fishers
Tom McCowan, a PhD student working for the Pāua Industry Council Ltd (PIC), is currently being housed at Dragonfly.
Tom’s job is to get the pāua dive-logger programme up and running nationwide - the next step from the proof-of-concept stage. The dive loggers collect detailed data on diver location and catch, and the programme will ultimately give fishers access to up-to-date information on the state of the fishery, reef by reef. The loggers are currently being widely used in the Marlborough and Chatham Islands areas.
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An interesting (and extremely useful) character turns up
Dr Joel Pitt is at Dragonfly for the next few months, doing contract work developing websites and back-end systems. Joel describes himself as part scientist, part software engineer, and fascinated with artificial intelligence and consciousness.
“I’ve been working in a business setting for the last year, so it’s great to be able to just focus on code again,” he says.
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Flesh-footed shearwaters caught by recreational fishers
Collecting dead birds from Bay of Plenty beaches after the Rena grounding showed that not all the deaths were caused by the 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil that leaked from the vessel.
The team that handled more than 2000 oiled birds also found 64 unoiled flesh-footed shearwaters that were in good body condition, and found evidence that some had apparently been killed as a result of interactions with recreational fishers.
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Dragonfly grows database and programming expertise
The appointment of Richard Mansfield to the Dragonfly team brings some complementary programming and web development expertise to the company. Previously from Catalyst IT, Richard is a specialist in open source software development for the web.
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More robins released near Eastbourne
More than 70 people were involved in the translocation of 40 North Island robins from Kapiti Island to the hills behind Eastbourne in April as part of the MIRO (Mainland Island Restoration Operation) project run by volunteers.
Yvan from Dragonfly was one of eight ‘catchers’ on Kapiti Island. He studied robins during his PhD and became expert at catching them, so was pleased to be able to help out.
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Mapping pāua catch with GPS
The Paua Industry Council (PIC) has been developing data logging technology for fisheries management for a number of years, but recently got Dragonfly involved to analyse their data, extract the relevant information and present it in a useful way.
A Marlborough-based pāua fishing company, Saavid Fishing Ltd, has monitored its fishery using GPS-based technology for some years, and helped develop and trial a number of different data logging units for PIC.
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Better communication by design
Design students from Massey University are again looking for ways to improve communication of the complex issues around fishing bycatch, focussing on our fur seals, white-capped albatross and black petrels.
The project is a 4th year Information Design paper, taken as part of a Bachelor of Design (Hons). Students are challenged to take the raw data provided by Dragonfly, and translate it into a relevant graphic form for a selected audience.
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Counting kiwis
Simon Morton spoke to Stu Cockburn from the Department of Conservation and Edward from Dragonfly about their project monitoring North Island brown kiwi in the Rimutaka Forest Park on This Way Up, Radio New Zealand National. Susan Ellis from the Rimutaka Forest Park Trust was also interviewed.
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Reducing incidental captures of seabirds in inshore fisheries
In recent years, awareness of seabird bycatch in inshore fisheries has grown considerably. A recent expert workshop run by the Department of Conservation and Ministry of Fisheries, and attended by Dragonfly, discussed bycatch reduction measures for inshore trawl and bottom longline fisheries.
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Johanna Pierre joins Dragonfly
Having worked together on several protected species projects in the last seven years, Johanna Pierre is joining Dragonfly Science this month. She will also maintain her private consultancy, JPEC.
“I have enjoyed the projects I’ve worked on with Edward and Finlay, and am looking forward to joining forces with them”, she says.
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New Zealand sea lion data
Data for sea lion pup production and tag-resight studies.
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Seabird estimation report published
A recent Aquatic Environment and Biodiversity Report estimates the number of seabirds captured during commercial fishing in New Zealand waters between 2002–03 and 2008–09.
In New Zealand, government observers are present on some vessels and record any captures of seabirds and other protected species that occur. This study estimated the total numbers of seabirds that would have been reported if observers had been present on every fishing vessel.
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Making connections in Japan
Finlay Thompson from Dragonfly travelled to Tokyo in September to attend two conferences hosted by the National Institute of Informatics and meet collaborators in the Parallel GHC project. The visit was also an opportunity to build networks in the high performance computing communities.
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Seabirds on the menu
Dragonfly staff attended the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society conference, held in Oban on Stewart Island from 5-8 July.
Getting to the island entailed travelling through Bluff, one of the few places where sooty shearwater pies may be bought for lunch.
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Estimated sea lion bycatch in 2008–09
Dragonfly estimated that around 78 sea lions were caught in New Zealand trawl fisheries in the 2008-09 fishing year. This was the lowest number of estimated captures since 2002-03.
The estimates, based on observer reported captures, were made for trawls targeting squid, southern blue whiting and other species near Auckland Island, Campbell Island and the southern end of the Stewart-Snares shelf. The estimate includes sea lions that may have escaped from the net through sea lion exclusion devices.
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Common dolphin captures in 2008–09
Estimates of common dolphin bycatch in the the jack mackerel trawl fishery over a 13-year period were recently published by Dragonfly in a report based on data from 1995 to 2009. Common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) are the most frequently observed cetacean caught in New Zealand trawl fisheries.