On Thursday 5 March 2026 the WildObs team presented their first public webinar to approximately 200 attendees, with another 100 attendees registered to recieve the recording once complete. 

 

Hamish Holewa, the Director of Planet Research Data Commons (ARDC), welcomed attendees and provided an introduction to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the partnerships that form the collaborative initiative of WildObs. 

 

Assoc. Prof Matthew Luskin, Director of WildObs (UQ), gave an overview of the challenges that the WildObs was created to address, and the problems that the project is focussed on. 

 

Colin Broughton, Conservation Systems Developer (Bush Heritage Australia) provided a non-government organisation case study of WildObs to achieve the goals of doing more camera trapping, more effectively, faster, cheaper and with higher accuracy, with a focus on being able to share more Bush Heritage Data. 

 

Dr Jenna Wraith, WildObs Project Manager (QCIF), introduced the WildObs team and partners and an overview of the WildObs infrastructure.

 

Dr Zachary Amir, Principal Data Scientist (TERN), discussed the WildObs Image Platform and WildObs Database. 

 

Dr Renee Piccolo, Data Scientist (UQ), introduced WildObs data sharing terms, including data licencing and data sharing levels. 

 

The team then answered a number of attendee questions, including some highlighting key differences to existing tools, the role of human validation of AI annnotation of camera trap images, training models for specific environments and the treatment of culturally sensitive data. 

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