Given that the Magpie Fiddler Ray is listed as threatened by the IUCN Red List, and immature male fiddlers are common in prawn trawl bycatch, it was important to clear this up. Clarifying whether it was a different species would have an impact on its conservation status and approach to management.

Conservation management of naturally rare or seldom encountered fish can be tricky, as documenting changes to abundance can be a challenging task. The Magpie Fiddler Ray was considered to be genuinely rare, not just hard to observe, because all known specimens were found in shallow waters of the well-populated and frequently trawled coastlines of the Gulf of St Vincent and Kangaroo Island.

DNA analysis would have resolved the issue once and for all. However scientists were thwarted by a lack of specimens suitable for DNA analysis and its apparent rarity as the Magpie Fiddler Ray was known, until recently, from only a single specimen deposited in the South Australian Museum over 60 years ago.

Scientists couldn’t wait 60 years for another Magpie Fiddler Ray to show up, so the South Australian Museum turned to the citizen scientist community for help. From 2001 it issued calls through the media and recreational fishing websites for people to watch out for specimens of this elusive but easily recognised species.

Those calls were successful, with two specimens and three new photographic records of the Magpie Fiddler Ray coming through from the recreational fishing community between 2001 and 2013. Surprisingly, most were from the Adelaide suburban coast and the Port River.

This gave the team enough material to work with. They used the latest DNA sequencing technology to compare the genome of these new Magpie Fiddler Ray specimens with 50 specimens of the Southern Fiddler Ray. They also analysed examples of the Eastern Fiddler Ray, to provide a ‘yardstick’ for the between species. All comparative samples were drawn from the South Australian Museum’s phenomenal Australian Biological Tissue Collection, the largest in the southern hemisphere, with more than 138,000 animal tissues available for genetic analysis collected over five decades.

Genetic analysis of the specimens showed very clear results. The Southern and Eastern Fiddler Rays were clearly highly distinct, and in contrast the two Magpie Fiddler Ray specimens were obviously members of the Southern Fiddler Ray gene pool.

Scientists simultaneously re-examined the appearance of these rays, including their shape, length and skin features but found no significant differences apart from the colour pattern. The strongly black and white pattern of the Magpie Fiddler Ray could be attributed to ‘leucism’, a condition that results in loss of pigmentation that isn’t uncommon in many kinds of fishes and other vertebrates.

And so the team was able to demonstrate that the Magpie Fiddler Ray, isn’t its own species at all, but is a colour variation of the common and widespread Southern Fiddler Ray. They published their results in the scientific journal “Zootaxa” in July 2015. Distribution maps of the Fiddler Ray species based on museum collection records from all over the country, are available through the Atlas of Living Australia.

Professor Steve Donnellan, Chief Research Scientist at the South Australian Museum’s Evolutionary Biology Unit commented that “this is the sort of science that museum researchers love doing, it involves interested members of the public to solve long-standing mysteries and of course we couldn’t do it without the efforts of many people over many decades accumulating invaluable specimens, tissues and records in our museums. It’s this sort of approach involving focused public partnerships that we like to use increasingly to solve issues in our fish research program.”

The National Reserve System forms a network of more than 9000 properties, covering more than 11 per cent of the continent, including national parks run by all levels of government, lands managed by Indigenous owners and non-profit organisations, and parts of working properties managed for conservation by farmers.

Bush Blitz began in 2010 and has conducted expeditions to diverse areas including Flinders Island in Bass Strait, Queensland’s wet tropics, the Gawler Ranges in South Australia and now to the stunning Judbarra/ Gregory National Park. Over the last five years these expeditions have found more than 900 new species, located 250 threatened species, and recorded 12,000 types of plants and animals in new localities. The latest expedition at Judbarra/ Gregory discovered at least seven new species of spider, including a previously unknown genus of tarantula. Other highlights included a record of one of Australia’s rarest fish, the Neil’s Grunter (Scortum neili) and the first record of the swamp eel from the Victoria River catchment.

While conducting a survey in the field might be the most exciting part of a Bush Blitz, a lot of the work takes place afterwards, as scientists return to museums and herbaria to identify, document and preserve the specimens and data collected, and work towards making new information available to land managers, government agencies and the public. These new specimens and sightings add to more than 30 million records held by museums and herbaria across the country. Museums and other collections play a vital role in preserving these specimens for the use of scientists and the general public, and preserving this invaluable record of our nation’s biodiversity for the future.

Collections are particularly important in species discovery and taxonomy, as type specimens of newly discovered species are lodged in public collections such as museums, so that they are preserved indefinitely, and always accessible for review. Types are the individual specimen whose characteristics are described in the scientific paper naming the new species. Preservation and accessibility of these specimens ensures that future generations of taxonomists can verify identifications and expand our knowledge of the world around us. There are often new species to describe from the trips, either as complete new finds, or key material that contributes to broader detective work that helps uncover how many species are actually present.

Upon their return to the museum, staff prepare each specimen for long term storage, which can include fixing tissues of mammals, fish and reptiles, pinning and drying insects, identifying species,and carefully labelling each specimen.

Once the specimen is safely preserved, museum staff record information such as the identification, location and date of capture in databases, so those data can be used for all sorts of research, including large and small scale ecology, genetic analysis and land management.

This process takes considerable time, but data resulting from the Judbarra/ Gregory National Park Bush Blitz expedition will eventually be published online through the Atlas of Living Australia, for the information of the research community and general public. Bush Blitz records will add to more than 10 million collections-sourced records that form an invaluable resource in our quest to better understand Australia’s biodiversity.

DigiVol enables volunteers from around the world to transcribe handwritten diaries, scientist notebooks and specimen labels, and identify location data – in turn creating a digital record for physical ones. Through DigiVol, volunteers are helping museums and universities to make their research material available to everyone online. The data has many uses but most important is that it can help scientists and planning officials better understand, utilise, manage and conserve Australia’s precious biodiversity.

Paul Flemons is Head of Citizen Science at Australia Museum and the manager of DigiVol, he explains “DigiVol enables the public to contribute to the process of scientific discovery in a way never previously possible. This is invaluable to museums in a time of scarce government funding.”

Each DigiVol project is called an Expedition and can contain a number of pages or specimens that need to be transcribed into a digital version. Megan Edey as the largest contributor to DigiVol has completed over 40,000 tasks! Megan explains more about her work “I like doing both the insect and the diary expeditions on DigiVol. I especially liked working on the Edgar Waite diaries and following his life story. DigiVol is interspersed throughout my day, I sometimes log on in between doing the washing or feeding the horses or whenever the family are watching something boring on TV!  I can be logged on for between 2 and 5 hours a day.”

The unique volunteer experience is explained in this Australian Museum blog “Different volunteers enjoy different tasks, with some of them becoming obsessed with the lives of the diary writers, others with transcribing insect labels. All of their efforts are captured in the DigiVol Honour Board where they aspire to be a Weekly Wonder, Monthly Maestro or DigiVol Legend by transcribing the most tasks weekly, monthly and overall.”

DigiVol and its capability to assist with the enormous task of digitising their collections  is not restricted to Australia’s museums and collections either;  institutions like the Smithsonian, New York Botanic Gardens, and Kew Gardens have also chosen DigiVol to host their own virtual expeditions to digitise their collections.

The University of Melbourne Herbarium is the latest collection institution to join in the DigiVol effort, with their first expedition focusing on legume specimens from the Burnley Horticultural College.

If you’d like to get involved and join DigiVol, simply head to www.volunteer.ala.org.au and there’s a Facebook group too. Happy transcribing!

What do we mean by “digitisation” and why is it important? Digitisation is the act of creating a digital record for an existing physical one. For example, transcribing hand-written specimen tags or photographing old expedition diaries into digital and searchable resources. Digitisation ensures that fragile physical collections be preserved long-term; reducing physical handling of items which would cause deterioration over time or even loss. Allowing these digital versions to be available online is important to global biodiversity research; eliminating the requirement to visit a collection in person, these resources become available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Representatives from across Australia and around the globe converged on the CSIRO Black Mountain site in Canberra to share their knowledge, experience, and thoughts on issues such as: data sharing, digitisation techniques, imaging, new technologies, data visualisation, outreach, public participation, and project management. Participants also had a chance to tour some of the CSIRO collections that are held in Canberra: Australian National Wildlife Collection, Australian National Insect Collection, and neighbouring Australian National Botanic Gardens.

The summit gave stage to representatives from international collections such as the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum of London, and locally the  Australian Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens, SA Museum, and the Marine Biodiversity Hub (just to name a few), to share their current results and future requirements in the global effort to digitise and share records to enable open access in biodiversity knowledge.

After 4 days of presentations and discussions, the workshop participants reached five important conclusions and associated action items, these crucial points and greater detail on the summit program can be investigated further in a recent piece by iDigBio’s Gil Nelson.

Please visit the following link for further information about this event: https://www.idigbio.org/content/digitization-biological-collections-global-focus

Australia’s biodiversity knowledge and conservation is strongly supported and powered by volunteers, with plenty of people choosing to spend their time in the great outdoors; improving, protecting, and promoting our unique ecosystems. Biodiversity volunteers aren’t just out in the bush though. Many help behind-the-scenes in our museums, galleries, herbariums, and collections. People from all walks of life are getting involved in the enormous effort to digitise the vast collections of records and specimens held by such institutions.

Worldwide, an estimated five million invertebrate species are yet to be described, according to the Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World.  Invertebrates – animals without a backbone or vertebral column – are the most abundant group of animals on earth and yet they are the least documented. In Australia alone there are around 98,000 described species and an estimated 222,000 that are still unknown to science.

The South Australian Museum holds around two million specimens in its terrestrial invertebrate collection and around 1.75 million marine invertebrates. The Museum has begun a digitisation program to help address this backlog, and their doing this vital work using the Atlas of Living Australia and Australian Museum developed DigiVol portal.

To learn more about the efforts of the SA Museum volunteers and the importance of their work, click here.

While National Volunteer Week concludes for another year, the volunteering efforts to transform biological expedition diaries and specimen tags never ends. If you’re interested in getting involved, please visit our DigiVol volunteer page  and best of all you don’t even need to leave the house to join in the fun of transcription!

The specimens held by Australia’s natural history collections underpin our knowledge of Australia’s biodiversity. What sets collections-based records apart from other (mostly observational) records in the ALA is that they are all based on preserved specimens housed in museums and herbaria. These specimens provide a permanent record of the occurrence of a species at a particular place and time, and are the primary resource for research on the classification and distribution of Australian plants, animals and fungi.

Because the data is based on physical specimens that can be re-examined, the identification of suspect records can be checked and the data can be kept up to date as species concepts change, and as our understanding of Australia’s biodiversity improves. They can also document changes in individual species through time: specimens collected in the past may present traits that differ slightly from what can be seen in the wild today. Museums and herbaria also house specimens of species that are now extinct in the wild, sometimes providing the only physical evidence that a species ever existed!

Specimen records are important for scientific research, and natural history collections are critical references for scientists from a vast breadth of the biological and environmental science disciplines. For example, researchers used museum paleontological specimens, preserved skeleton DNA and contemporary DNA to prove that the Tasman Booby, a bird believed to be extinct, was still living on islands in the North Tasman Sea (Steeves et al. 2010).

When the collecting data associated with a specimen is made visible on the ALA website, it is accessible to the entire world: geographical impediments to closer investigation are minimised.
Along with the collecting of data, high quality images of specimens are increasingly becoming available through the ALA. This allows researchers to investigate specimens from all over Australia – often in microscopic detail. As well as making access to collections data much easier, aggregating the specimen data from multiple collections in the one place allows researchers to investigate biodiversity in new ways.

Collections-based data are being enthusiastically used by the research community right now – scientific researchers, ecological researchers, and conservation management/planning have been the largest groups of users. The 10 million+ records from natural history collections in the ALA have been part of almost 140,000 separate download events in the last 12 months, totalling more than 550 million data points downloaded.
The 10 millionth record was provided by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), who are just one of the many collections who are regularly contributing to the ALA database.

The Yugul Mangi Ranger Two-way Biodiversity Project is not just about working in Arnhem Land, but also communicating outcomes to the rest of Australia. For that reason, some of our team recently travelled to Sydney and Canberra for 2 weeks in March 2015. We gave presentations and are writing this blog to teach non-Indigenous people about the great things Indigenous people are doing in remote Australia for our Country and communities. We also want to encourage more cross-cultural collaboration between scientists and Indigenous people and for other Indigenous Ranger groups to get involved in the Atlas of Living Australia.

While down south, we did three presentations: a 3 hour workshop for 2nd year University students at UNSW for the Indigenous Perspectives in Science course; a 20 minute BioSeminar at Macquarie University to academics and Masters students; and a one hour presentation at ANU for our funding partners – the ALA and Australian National University (ANU) Centre for Biodiversity Analysis (CBA). Mostly, Kelvin Rogers (Yugul Mangi Ranger) led the talks, with smaller contributions from two Ngukurr school students (Lester Gumbula and Nehemiah Farrell) and Emilie Ens and Mitchell Scott from Macquarie University. Another aim of the trip was to deliver some animal tissue samples from Arnhem Land to Professor Craig Moritz (CBA, ANU) as he and his lab group are going to help us identify some species and possibly identify new species to science. We are excited about being involved in this process.

The primary aim of our presentation at ANU and our meeting at CSIRO in Canberra was to inform the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) mob about how we’ve been using their website, and how we can best integrate Indigenous content. We are working together to make it easy for everyone, including Aboriginal people, to contribute to this Australian Biodiversity resource. At the meeting we were joined (via video link) by representatives from CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences (Cairns) who are also working on this ALA Indigenous project with the Olkola Rangers (Nth Queensland).

A core aim of this project is also to work with the Ngukurr School and introduce young students to science, Ranger work and land management. We take Ngukurr students out on Yugul Mangi Ranger biodiversity surveys and also sometimes when we travel interstate to contribute to communications about the project. Ngukurr School is the main school in the region and teaches 300 children from the Ngukurr community of 1000.

The school principal selected high school students Lester Gumbula and Nehemiah Farrell to attend this trip as they both had high attendance, are doing well at school, and find ranger work and biodiversity surveys interesting. The students both contributed to the making and presentation of the talks. We hope that by rewarding good students in this way we will encourage other young people in the community to attend school and study hard.

In addition to the presentations, the team also visited numerous science labs and institutions as the Ngukurr School has a limited science education program. We visited the Glasshouses, Museum and Lizard Lab at Macquarie University, the Genetics Lab at ANU, the Australian National Botanic Gardens and Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra.

We also visited the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra where staff showed us how to use the computers to search for records of family and friends from Ngukurr. The AIATSIS Perfect Pictures database has over 140,000 photos which is about 20% of the total AIATSIS archives and can only be viewed at AIATSIS in Canberra.

“They got heaps of Ngukurr records, it’s a place where we can put our photos and other people can see them.” – Kelvin Rogers, Yugul Mangi Ranger

We then headed to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which has been based beside Old Parliament House in Canberra since 1972. As we were having a look around, we met the official fire-keeper. It was his job to keep the fire burning no matter what, day and night. It made sense to us that just like keeping a fire burning, this Tent Embassy was about maintaining a strong and continuous Indigenous presence in Canberra and in the minds of all Australians and international visitors. Talking to Indigenous and non-indigenous people staying at the Embassy, at the front of everyone’s mind was the closure of remote communities in Western Australia. We want people to know that Indigenous people living on and managing their own Country is key to land management (Remote Indigenous communities are vital for fragile ecosystems – article in The Conversation)

We invited some of members of the Tent Embassy to our talk at ANU and we were really happy that they came along to support us. Thanks!

A trip to Sydney and Canberra wouldn’t be complete without having a look around. We visited Centre Point Tower, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Royal Easter Show, surfed Sydney’s beaches and went to Parliament House (Canberra).

Thanks to the ALA and ANU/ CBA for supporting our trip and all the people who showed us around the science labs and institutions.

This post has been produced by the Yugul Mangi Rangers of south-east Arnhem Land. Read more about their Indigenous Ecological Knowledge projects on the ALA blog:

Learning by doing: Yugul Mangi Rangers and the Leichhardt’s Grasshopper: Arnhem Land

Although small in size compared to the state and territory herbaria, it is the largest and most botanically diverse university herbarium, and makes a valuable contribution to our combined knowledge of the Australian flora. All major botanical groups are housed in the collection, but it is particularly rich in algae and non-vascular plants.

About 10 per cent of the collection has been databased to date, adding over 9,000 records to the Atlas. More MELU specimen records will be added to the Atlas as the collection continues to be databased by a team of volunteers – who are mostly undergraduate students – and herbarium staff. Volunteering at the herbarium gives students great insights into botanical diversity as well as an understanding of how natural history collections are managed.

Although all herbaria are important research collections, university herbaria, in particular, have an important role in teaching the next generation of botanists. The herbarium is a valuable teaching resource, explains Herbarium Curator, Dr Gillian Brown. “Specimens are used in practical classes to demonstrate the diagnostic features of different plant groups and some subjects require students to prepare their own specimens, which in turn are incorporated into the collection.”

As well as being available in the broader Atlas, these specimens can be viewed in Australia’s Virtual Herbarium (AVH), a special ‘hub’ of the Atlas, which provides access to the combined holdings of Australia’s government and university herbaria. The ability to easily view the specimen-based herbarium collections in a single location provides a valuable research and collections management tool for botanical researchers and herbarium curators.

There are 16 herbaria in Australian universities, which together house over 420,000 specimens. MELU is only the second university herbarium to deliver data to the Atlas and AVH. The N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium (NE) at the University of New England has over 80,000 recordsin the Atlas.

All the papers are open access and freely available to download. So what are you waiting for? Grab a coffee and delve into this fascinating issue.