Sad reason why six rare Aussie animals were placed in backpacks and flown 570km to secure location
Fewer than 100 southern brush-tailed rock-wallabies remain in the wild, primarily due to habitat destruction and predation by invasive European foxes. But there are an additional 300 to 400 living at the Mount Rothwell sanctuary, west of Melbourne, which is run by environmental charity the Odonata Foundation.
Its chief operating officer Matt Singleton explained the wallabies are a curious creature that scales high rocky cliffs, watching people as they walk past. 'They stand up there almost like meerkats. When you sit still and watch them... they mind their own business, but they're always keeping a watchful eye over you,' he said.
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With most of the brush-tailed rock-wallabies at this one location, just north of the You Yangs, the species was deemed susceptible to threats like bushfire. So work is being done to spread the genetics around to improve the health of two smaller populations at faraway predator-proof sanctuaries.
Wallabies placed inside backpacks to keep them calm
When populations get too small, there's a danger they can become inbred. On Friday morning, three males and three females with healthy genetics were selected to be sent to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in the ACT where a population of 20 live. At the same time, two will be taken from Tidbinbilla to Central Victoria, to help set up a population there.
Tidbinbilla is well known for its work in helping save threatened species, and it is one of the last remaining places on Earth where the critically endangered Canberra grassland earless dragon survives.
Brush-tailed rock-wallabies are well known for their ability to help the landscape by nibbling between long tussock grasses, potentially improving the landscape for dragons, which require open spaces. They also spread mycorrhizal fungi, which attach to tree roots to help them communicate.
As Singleton spoke to Yahoo on Friday afternoon, the wallabies were mid-flight. Each was placed inside a backpack so they'd feel comfortable.
'They feel like they're in a pouch, and it reduces stress on the animals. A lot of macropods like rock wallabies have stress toxins build up in their bodies and they can be fatal to them,' he said.
After the wallabies are picked up at Canberra Airport, they'll be placed inside one to two-hectare pens to keep them quarantined from the established Tidbinbilla while they adjust.
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While the Odonata Foundation has been successful in breeding up numbers, Singleton said the Southern Brush-Tailed Rock-Wallaby Recovery Team's work has been a collaborative effort.
'I think it's a great example of how people can work together to achieve really great outcomes to recover a species. And from Odonata's perspective, our work couldn't be done without the support of Amazon's Right Now Climate Fund,' he said in reference to the tech giant's $100 million nature investment fund to help conserve natural landscapes and build climate resilience around the world.
The project was also supported by the ACT Government and Cesar Australia.
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Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Measuring for success: innovation comes to ore screening
The mining industry is facing up to a new reality that has, for some time, been taking root: ore grades are declining, deposit complexity is increasing and becoming less economic, while competition for mineral resources such as water and energy is becoming tougher. 'How do we approach these challenges in a technological sense, is what many of us are asking,' says David Miljak, research programme director for sensing and sorting, mineral resources at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia's preeminent national science agency. For the energy-intensive ore screening and sorting part of the mining process, Miljak and his team, along with other start-ups and academics, are looking to provide the answer to this question. Rocks are usually sorted particle by particle using methods like X-ray transmission (XRT). However, there is significant scope for improving this process with advanced technologies that offer more informed and faster analysis and, ultimately, better data capture, according to experts like Miljak. He and his team are advancing radio frequency, X-ray and nuclear sensing instrumentation for high-throughput conveyor belt systems used early in the mining process that can 'interrogate' the rocks. 'What we want to know is how much copper, for example, is in the rocks; if we know that accurately and fast enough, we can divert them for processing and reject the rocks that are low in copper and aren't economic to mine,' he explains. 'This can have enormous benefits in uplifting the ore grade, the economics and the sustainability of the operation.' In this way, low-grade rocks do not need to be crushed, meaning the overall process requires less energy and water usage. It also minimises the material entering tailings dams. Ore screening technology Miljak, who has almost 30 years' experience in radio frequency-based technology, was involved in developing, over 15 years, magnetic resonance technology (MRT) that was commercialised through NextOre, a company spun out of CSIRO in 2017. In March, NextOre announced its first solution for analysing ore transported by underground copper trucks, an adaptation of its conveyor belt application. MRT is a form of radio frequency spectroscopy that can be used to count the atoms of a target metal in a sample. It works by subjecting ore to pulses of radio waves set to the signature frequency of the target mineral. The resonating ore produces a radio field burst, known as a 'spin echo', which is quantitatively measured by the sensor. The data generated by the MRT analyser is presented as real-time weight measurements of the target metal which, combined with weightometer readings, provides real-time grade as weight per cent of the material. The technology can do this for 50 tonnes (t) of material in under a minute, according to NextOre, providing mining operations with real-time data that informs ore routing decisions. It has been demonstrated at several operations including First Quantum Minerals' Kansanshi mine in Zambia, Lundin's Candelaria mine in Chile and Capstone's Cozamin mine in Mexico, with a trial at Cozamin reporting a 7.5% increase in copper production without additional mining. This technology is related to magnetic resonance imaging machines used in medicine, but must be adapted to mining conditions that are harsh and dusty. 'These technologies have been around for decades, but what we are trying to do is tweak the physics to make it work in minerals, which is actually a huge undertaking; you have got to re reinvent how you transmit the radio waves onto the targets," says Miljak. Hyperspectral sensing technology Another spin-out innovating in this space is Hypermine, born from VTT, a Finland-based European research organisation. Its technology combines laser illumination, hyperspectral sensing and proprietary machine-learning algorithms, to sort the valuable minerals at the earliest stage of the mining process. The company, which in June announced a successful closure of its seed funding round, claims the technology helps cut energy use by 10% and can reduce ore flotation acids and water usage by 15%. It does this by making stockpiling decisions 100-times more accurate, says CTO Mikhail Mekhrengin. He adds that the company is already detecting alumina contamination in its iron mines and sulphate contamination in copper mines, with four systems implemented in customer operations in Brazil, Chile and South Africa. 'Hypermine enables actionable data for each shovel or truck load, as well as the potential of a 3–10% higher mining profitability due to fewer valuable materials being lost into waste, less gangue in the process and more consistent feed to processing plants,' Mekhrengin says. Similarly, Germany-based Steinert is providing sensor-based sorting technology to uncover ore's composition in real time, adopted by Terra Goyana bauxite mining operation in Brazil. Successful trials at the site showed the technology could remove contaminants at an improved rate. Multiple complementary solutions These solutions can work in tandem with to X-ray technology, experts say. The difference, Mekhrengin explains, is that X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is based on elemental analysis to provide ore-grade information, whereas laser spectroscopy or hyperspectral sensing are optical technologies that provides molecular content of the material, including mineral content and concentrations, lithologies, rock type and chemistry. 'Why is mineralogy/rock type important? Because metals are never presented in a pure form in nature. They are enclosed in minerals. It is hard to impossible to translate elemental information to mineralogical data. In the perfect case, you need both,' he says, adding: 'On top of XRF, mineralogy is crucial to understanding how to process the mined material.' A spokesperson for NextOre adds that XRT is applied only in rock-by-rock, or 'particle' sorting applications, is cost intensive and can become very complex and expensive for higher throughput applications greater than 200 tonnes per hour (tph). 'Conversely, magnetic resonance is particularly well suited for bulk applications, extending currently to 6,500tph and almost certain to go higher.' Improving processing plants In addition to sorting, CSIRO and Miljak are applying similar techniques to measure what is in flotation plants during the extraction process. Technology that can quantify the mineral phases changing in real time could help operators address or mitigate 'upsets' in the mineral processing that spoil the entire operation, says Miljak. It could lead to mitigating actions such as changing the feedstock to blend out the bad mineral actor. 'It could be a certain mineral that makes the recovery process go off; it is a disruption. We can pick these up very quickly with the technology we have – this is a unique capability we have developed in the last 5–10 years,' he says. "If operators are not privy to these big deviations, recoveries can drop, so stopping them earlier could lead to higher yields. Over a long period, increasing recovery by even a few per cent for a big mine can potentially provide thousands of tonnes of more products – a fortune depending on what commodity is being mined.' CSIRO is working with some companies to pilot its "robust bits of technology" but is also looking for additional mining partners. Innovations in screening Further down the sorting and crushing process, Weir recently launched the ETX250, which it says is the largest double deck banana screen in the world for separating big and small rocks. The company says the screen, which is run by only two exciters, could reduce energy consumption by 40%, further supporting miners sustainability targets and reducing rising energy costs. 'Having only two exciters [rather than three] reduces the amount of inventory the customer has to keep, as well as maintenance, while giving better fine screening efficiency because we can run the exciter at a higher speed,' explains Corné Kleyn, global product manager at The Weir Group. The company recently sold 12 to a high profile mining operation in Pakistan. Incorporating AI into minerals screening and sorting The next step for data-driven technologies is coupling them with AI and machine learning (ML). While this is not Miljak and his team's focus, he says there are "big overlays". 'There is a beautiful train of data here that can be paired with AI ML, neural nets, and so on, that can be used to improve process based on historical data and to predict problems,' he explains. 'I think part of our problem is people aren't used to having mineral phase data in real time. So, it would be a new research endeavour to try and make the best of the data flows to improve it even further.' Nicolaas Steenkamp, an independent consultant who is a geologist by training, says AI could be valuable for improving these processes. 'Today, X-ray transmission technologies used in the mining industry do thousands of millions of calculations for each individual grain and that data is just discarded, it doesn't feed into production, but this could be processed in the cloud to give a much better insight into production,' he says. 'That can inform your processing plant in terms of the type of material it can expect to come through, enabling them to regulate the agents they will need to add to a specific processing cycle.' However, this is mostly "blue sky or proof of concept" technology right now, he adds. Vision for the future Steenkamp says the key driver for adopting these technologies is ultimately processing less ore, so a project is using less water, power and leaching agents to get a higher grade, while reducing the tailings. Wheaton Precious Metals president and CEO Randy Smallwood, a proponent of innovation in the mining industry, agrees these are important drivers for technology adoption. The company's Future of Mining Challenge awarded ReThink Milling $1m (C$1.37m) for its innovative milling technologies, which are estimated to reduce the energy use in comminution by more than half. However, as Steenkamp notes, for the bigger players, investing in cutting-edge technology is not a high priority as most are still operating at margins that mean they don't need to invest in high-cost equipment. For the small and medium operators, the cost often precludes them from adopting it. Although some industries, such as the diamond sector, are more used to using different types of technology and will therefore likely have more confidence to adopt, he adds. 'At the end of the day, you have got to have someone that is willing to be a participant and then be willing to share that data into the market, which can then convince your larger players to start adopting it,' he says. Miljak acknowledges there is general "inertia" within the industry when it comes to piloting and adopting new technologies but says there are "some really good innovation teams and individuals that are really trying to make a difference in the industry". 'My view is it will be an important lever for the future, if we can get a whole raft of technologies and innovators into this mining space to transform mining into manufacturing-type process, where real-time data can keep people safe and productivity high. That is the longer-term vision of CSIRO,' he concludes. "Measuring for success: innovation comes to ore screening" was originally created and published by Mining Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNET
5 hours ago
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This Nature App Uses AI to Turn Anyone Into a Wildlife Expert. Here's How to Get Started
When I recently moved, one of the building's standout features was the plethora of different plant species in front of its windows. But not like standard landscaping -- more like drier plants, seemingly native to the area. Curious and fairly incompetent in plant sciences, I looked for help in being able to categorize and understand more about it. That's how I found Seek by iNaturalist, a free app where you take photos of plants, animals and fungi. Artificial intelligence suggests its type -- with human confirmation -- while your input and contributions elevate scientific research. What is Seek and how does it use AI? Founded in 2008 as a master's project from UC Berkeley students, iNaturalist later became a joint initiative between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. It strives to connect people to nature and conservation through crowdsourced data. Today, it contains more than 250 million observations of more than a half-million species. (And I just added seven more in roughly 5 minutes.) Seek by iNaturalist is 100% free thanks to donors who contributed to the platform. It operates as a nonprofit organization that makes all collected data -- with the option to turn it off -- openly accessible to scientists and conservationists worldwide. iNaturalist uses computer vision AI to analyze uploaded photos against a model trained on millions of previous observations. AI is also used on the back end -- it optimizes species recognition accuracy, to display the most relevant photos alongside suggestions and pattern recognition improvements. This helps you distinguish between similar-looking species at home or across your local ecosystems. According to the iNaturalist team, "When you use the AI camera feature on any wild living thing, iNaturalist suggests an identification for what you might be seeing -- whether plant, insect, fungus or other organism." They shared that from there, that photo becomes a useful piece of data for science and conservation. But ultimately, a community of naturalists confirm or correct those AI suggestions. Together, AI and human intelligence help newcomers contribute to biodiversity documentation from their first upload. How to use iNaturalist to spot and categorize nature 1. First search for Seek in your app store of choice and create an account by signing up with email or a social media authenticator. You'll also need to allow camera and location permissions to be able to use the AI's computer vision and accurately detect species. 2. It's best to play around a bit before starting scans. Open the app and tap the camera button -- it's designed to recognize any plant, animal and fungi. I focused solely on plants, as that's what I had readily available. Snap a couple photos or hold the camera button down to snap continuously. Using iNaturalist's AI camera to identify a plant species. Screenshot by CNET As you're testing the camera out, note background images, angles and even lighting, which all play a part in the AI tool's ability to accurately recognize what you've captured. (I had to redo a couple because an attempt to take a birds-eye shot ended up with pictures of my feet.) 3. Next, the AI computer vision will analyze your photo and suggest possible species. This takes no longer than 30 seconds. Here you can also record GPS coordinates and you have the option to add details about behavior, size and other aspects of whatever it is you observed and captured. Beyond this, you can also toggle between privacy options, and select whether it is captive, like a plant, or wild, like natural growth. 4. AI also has suggestions for your species identification, which show up as percentages for accuracy. You can also post your observation -- if geoprivacy is open -- to the community for review by users and experts, like scientists. Once the community confirms your species, your observation becomes scientific data. The point here is that you are part of the collection process for scientists to learn more about species in the world. With your input and the community's approval, you're directly involved in this process. Think of yourself as a bridge between reality and what scientists are constantly trying to understand and improve. The iNaturalist team provided tips for getting the best results, alongside checking out their company guides, or downloading the Seek user guide: treat AI suggestions as a starting point, and engage with other humans; explore information on iNaturalist's database; and be aware that there are more advanced camera suggestions in the iPhone app over the Android app. Should you use iNaturalist? The app is designed like Instagram for nature lovers, with a volunteer process that positions itself as additional help for scientists' discoveries. In my opinion, technology that helps connect people to nature and advances scientific understanding is inherently valuable for our planet and future generations. Some of the privacy options available on the iNaturalist Seek app when you upload your observations. iNaturalist / Screenshot by CNET But even though Seek operates globally, with 3.7 million users, the identification accuracy depends heavily on having active expert communities in your region. This means rural or less-populated areas might get slower species confirmations. Additionally, the topic of AI ethics comes to mind. I asked the iNaturalist team about this. They responded that the location is important for information when correctly identifying species, especially wild ones. Yet they also noted that anyone using iNaturalist can "choose to obscure the precise locations of observations to protect their privacy" and that you can use the AI identification feature without creating an account or posting publicly. The iNaturalist team also regularly updates the Privacy Policy in support of the well-being of the community. The main goal is to create an open biodiversity dataset that can be used to protect nature around the world. Overall, Seek by iNaturalist is a great way to educate yourself and contribute to multiple versions of ecosystems in the process while learning and sharing your findings along the way -- or, as the iNaturalist team shared, a "virtuous cycle of collective effort and improvement, built on community trust and benefit in service of helping people connect with nature and biodiversity worldwide."
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Forbes
A Museum Survey Of More-Than-Human Design Shows How Animal Intelligence Can Fix Our Mistakes
Many years ago, some kind soul wove a pair of sandals for a horse. We will never know the identity of the weaver or the creature the sandals were woven for, but the shoes have endured for well over a century and are currently on view at London's Design Museum. The exhibition also includes more recent efforts to provide for nonhuman wants and needs, such as metal scaffolds for coral reefs, skyscrapers for birds, and playthings for octopodes. The gamut is indicative of the range of problems that have arisen, and the range of responses from the design community, in this age of climate change and mass-extinction. How do designers do their job when they take responsibility for the consequences of industrialization and decide that their clientele should – either practically or hypothetically – be more-than-human? Pollinator Pathmaker in Human Vision, 2023. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd. Courtesy of the artist and the Design Museum Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd. The objects selected for More Than Human suggest that there is both a throughline and a inflection point for design. There's a long tradition, stretching back to time immemorial, that involves technological enhancements of other species and living systems. More recently, there's a rupture that either explicitly or implicitly involves reevaluation of the design process from nonhuman perspectives. The horse's sandals belong to the former category, which acknowledges that humans have made alterations to the environment, from paved roads to global warming, and assumes that people can fix the problems they've created with equivalent ingenuity. At their best, people accelerate what evolution might achieve, facilitating adaptation at a pace that matches the unprecedented rate of destruction inflicted by past technologies. But they don't address the underlying causes of deterioration. A metal scaffold can give corals the chance to grow in waters that have become too warm or acidic for the homeostatic resilience provided by natural selection, and the artificially fortified coral reefs can potentially protect tidal ecosystems from increasingly extreme storms battering coastlines worldwide. On the other hand, no amount of scaffolding can alter carbon emissions or support environmental regulations. Even if the engineering works according to plan – somehow avoiding the unforeseen consequences of most technologies – designers will only ever manage to keep up with others whose designs advance the Anthropocene at the behest of capitalism. Several designers in the Design Museum survey call attention to this impasse with absurdism. For instance, Studio Ossidiana's City of Birds presents models of bird feeders and cages at an urban scale. The 'solution' to the problems birds encounter when confronted with human infrastructure is to present an alternative that enlarges habitats designed to tame aviankind. The real estate thereby gained further entrenches the forced compliance of birds to human ways of living. It's emblematic of the backhanded generosity underlying so many serious human efforts, such as the pseudo-environmentalist logic of anthropocentric ecosystem services. Studio Ossidiana, The City of Birds, 2019–22. Installation view. More than Human at the Design Museum. Courtesy of the Design Museum. Photo by Luke Hayes. Luke Hayes The roots of an alternative approach to design can be found in the 1970s, when the artist collective Ant Farm proposed to build a seaborne embassy for dolphins. As detailed in a proposal published in Esquire Magazine , the embassy was designed to connect human society with 'delphic civilization' by providing underwater passageways where people and cetaceans could meet and learn from each other. Although much was left to the imagination in terms of how they'd communicate – telepathy being a favorite option for want of generative AI – interspecies dialogue was presented as a logical extension of environmentalism that might surface policies and actions that humans could not fathom alone. Ant Farm's Embassy to the Dolphins was never constructed, but the presentation of the idea in mainstream media instigated conversations amongst human readers that would otherwise never have happened. This involved more than blandly 'raising awareness'. Ant Farm's proposition was critical of human civilization at a level that forced people to question everything. Ant Farm sought nothing less than to redesign the belief system underlying the Great Chain of Being. Since the '70s, artists and designers have engaged the umwelt of many other species. One of the most provocative examples included in the Design Museum exhibition is an experiment by the designer Thomas Thwaites. For several days, he attempted to live as a goat. The experiment involved prosthetic limbs and relocation to the Alps, where he lived with a herd, feeding on grass with an external stomach. His documentation has qualities of absurdism that effectively question human superiority. (Thwaites is manifestly less accomplished at being a goat than the goats in his midst.) More profoundly, Thwaites provides a template for finding common ground with other species by embodying their everyday experiences in their preferred habitat. The fact that his prosthetics and behavioral patterns are highly approximate is not a defect but instead provides essential space for insight. That doesn't solve problems for goats on its own, and Thwaites wouldn't make their lives better by designing prosthetics so that they could live like people. What is important is the hybrid space created through his efforts: a space that is inherently more-than-human and also more-than-caprine. More broadly construed, this is a space in which pluralistic design can take place. The most vital task of designers today is to design contexts for exchange as well as processes of design where humans are only one of many participants. For more-than-human design to become a reality, the practice itself must be designed. Perhaps the most significant finding in the survey presented by the Design Museum is one that the curators disregard in their presentation: The design of more-than-human design protocols has scarcely begun. Yet there are glimpses of what might be possible were design to take a more-than-human perspective, none more compelling than Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker . Working with computer scientists, Ginsberg has integrated the visual perception of insects into software that can design gardens optimized for the insects' umwelt. Of course pollinators and flowering plants have always codesigned their shared landscape through evolutionary processes guided by mutualism. Only in recent times have humans interfered by imposing contrasting priorities. Some human gardening practices have been symbiotically mutualistic, others parasitic. What Ginsberg successfully brings into the present is a procedure to involve nonhuman stakeholders. Ginsberg's gardens challenge human standards of beauty in ways that parallel the challenge to human standards of intelligence posed by Ant Farm, but they also prototype an alternative in a way that pollinators can enjoy. And because the gardens change over time through insects' interaction with the plants, the design process is not strictly mediated by people. More-than-human design need not always involve humankind. It hasn't in the past. In the future, one of the most effective design strategies may be to respect the practices of other species.
