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I am trying to find a connection between big data and ecology. Ecology mostly happens at the scale of the organisms involved except for things like bushfire and coral bleaching. We now have heaps of big data to work with but I don't really know what to do with it. The Australian Government is working on digital earth. http://www.ga.gov.au/about/projects/geographic/digital-earth-australia. The Carnegie Airborne Observatory is much closer to what I would like to get fingers on. It is big data, but has the resolution of individual organisms. https://cao.carnegiescience.edu/. Currently, I don't really have a framework for digital-earth-Australia in biodiversity studies and I am wondering if it makes more sense to other people. The only thing that I have seen is that for many desert and inland species, the location of available habitat moves around depending on recent rainfall and one can predict where bird species might be in a given year. Knowing about transient habitat is important for long term conservation of many species as it is how populations can exchange genes. GIS the primary tool that I would used to try and link local observations with big data. Still grappling with how.
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