So i arrived in Gladstone In December, a little while after i had originally planned, and was greeted at he airport by my supervisor Sarah. It was so nice to see her again and to be back on the project. After a whistle stop tour through town and some much needed food, Sarah took me the her university (Central Queensland University) where i met some of her fellow PhD students, CQU staff and also her supervisor Owen. I was lucky enough to find some accommodation with a lovely couple, one of which worked at the university. I met Mary that same day and she took me back the their house where i was to be spending the next 2 months.
I really lucked out, the house was beautiful and Mary and Adrian were awesome to live with. The next day was when the work began. So my job for the first few weeks was to analyse some of the thousands of images that were still to be analysed. This job sounds like it would take no time at all, but from previous posts i assure you it does not. Each image has to be analysed to state how many individuals are in the image; that is then split into how many people, dogs, horses or Grizzly bears are in each images; what species is in the image (hiker, bike rider, horse rider, runner, Grizzly Bear or unknown bear); which direction the subject was moving in; whether the image is to be exported (if there is an image of a Grizzly Bear or a clear photo of another carnivore); and finally whether the images were consecutive or not. So as you can imagine, having to do this on every image with a subject in it was very time consuming.
As well as data entry, i was checking emails and liaising with volunteers that were still working on images back in Canada, making sure that they were getting on OK and saving any completed image folders to the appropriate place. A couple of weeks into the placement Sarah gave me a little more challenging job where i was to help clean the data that was analysed.
So here is a quick explanation of how/why we cleaned the data; When the analysed data is sent to us, it is automatically laid out in an excel sheet. My job was to combine all the folders from each trail network. For example Cascade Amphitheater was split into 5 excel sheets; CAA1 – 5. I needed to combine all 5 spread sheets into 1 master spreadsheet called Cascade Amphitheater. I then needed to find all the images that had been sent for export and make a note to find the images at a later date. All the blank photos needed to be deleted from the spreadsheets as well as the time and date being checked. Using a number of complex formulas (which Sarah had already created) some of the data had to be combined to generate totals for statistics. It was pretty complicated so i wont bore you with too many details. But once i got the hand of it i was on a roll.
So this is what i was working on for my 2 months in Gladstone, i assure you it wasn’t all work though. I had a great time and learnt a lot about data gathering/cleaning and also statistics (which is definitely not my strong suit).
It was quickly dawning on me that it was nearly time to go back home. After being so home sick for so long i was now at a place where i would have been happy to stay out there for another good few months. But all good things have to come to an end, and lucky for me i was having a pit stop in Sydney before home….
My Placement Year - 30 weeks of wildlife, travelling, data analysis and everything in-between 