Welcome to TERN AEKOS. The team here are passionate about creating and improving tools that enable you to conduct your science much more easily than previously, or to conduct analyses that were not possible prior to the ability to seamlessly combine huge datasets. We aim to assist professional scientists, educators and land managers to answer some of our most challenging ecological questions, but also assist those that make land management decisions to do so with access to the best scientific information possible. Everyone in our multi-disciplinary team are essential to our success enabling us to keep up to date with the latest developments in ecosystem science, data science and the IT infrastructure and technologies that enable us to deliver our services to you. We welcome your ideas on how we can improve our data services or publish new datasets of national interest.
Anita Smyth (Data Outreach, Data Publishing and Biodiversity Science)
Anita is passionate about data collection, its analyses, visuals and open publication in ecology. She believes wholeheartedly in user-orientated data management and reuse, especially intelligible metadata and data download. Having completed her PhD on habitat fragmentation of bird populations in south-east Queensland rainforests almost 20-years ago, she has experience covering biodiversity monitoring, research, government reporting, teaching statistics and communicating AEKOS's data resources and services. She enjoys assisting data professionals with getting data uploading and access, scientific dataset publishing and reviewing and tracking AEKOS usage statistics. Anita is a member of the Ecosystem Science Council.
Caleb Coish (Projects and Finances)
Caleb supports TERN projects and finance arrangements at The University of Adelaide. He enjoys working TERN as he learns much about ecology and they appreciate learning about the ‘ins & outs’ of the university’s research management operations.
David (Squid) Turner (Information Modelling, Systems Architecture, Programming, Ecologist)
Squid works as an informatician on AEKOS designing its information model and information architecture. He enjoys both marine and terrestrial ecology and has spent a ‘doing everything’ from designing new survey protocols and collecting raw data through to complex modelling of ecological data. Squid also has a reasonable background building and programming computers and other software driven devices.
Mosheh Eliyahu (Developer, Systems Operations)
Mosheh is a software developer and maintains AEKOS infra-structure. He enjoys developing ecological software which allows the transformation of data from different data sources into the AEKOS information model and the rendition of the transformed data to data users via the web. The transformation of ecological data in the AEKOS environment has many moving parts and Mosheh enjoys maintaining the links between the backend systems both in developing these systems and deploying them into the cloud. Mosheh also enjoys learning about ecology which he believes is crucial to the coexistence of humans, animals and plants.
Tina Schroeder (Data Analyst, Ecology)
Tina works in AEKOS’s data analytic team on a part-time basis and in ecology on her PhD. She models existing ecological data for publication in AEKOS, including the review and development of the ecological ontology, data management of large dataset including the Q&A process and extensive methodological description of the data collection process. Tina has several years of experience in marine and terrestrial survey based data collection as part of research and citizen science projects as well as environmental management obligations (mining sector). She is particularly interested in improving the data collection, management and publication process for not - for profit and citizen science projects because many long-term ecological datasets remain unrecognised due to the lack of funds and appropriate data capture systems.
Tom Saleeba (Systems Developer, User Interfaces, Cloud infrastructure)
Tom works on systems development, user interfaces and cloud infrastructure for AEKOS. He enjoys working with organisations that provides exciting challenges and environments to be both a mentor and be mentored. He loves to build systems that are usable, secure, based on current technologies and useful/meaningful. Working on projects that make a difference and which require high quality solutions motivates me. He welcomes recognition of his achievements on AEKOS and enjoys giving back to the TERN community.
