Going deep on Māori language

May 14, 2018

Developer and data scientist Miles Thompson recently started working with Dragonfly on the Te Hiku Media Kōrero Māori project – applying machine learning to transcribing spoken Māori.

Ngā mihi ki a Caleb

May 10, 2018

Caleb Moses is all set to join Dragonfly later this month. He will bring valuable experience in machine learning, natural language processing, data analysis and data visualisation to the company.

Shout out to Kaicycle

January 23, 2018

A new, more spacious office has enabled Dragonfly to get set up with systems to recycle plastic and paper waste and to compost fruit skins and food scraps.

An albatross album

January 15, 2018

During the move towards a paperless office, Elis digitised Edward's slides from a trip to Campbell Island in 1996 and shared them on Flickr. The album has adorable images of fluffy albatross chicks at the Bull Rock colony.

Sharing science across the Pacific

December 21, 2017

Dragonfly is sharing its analysis methods and data with scientists in Japan to build a more complete picture of seabird bycatch in Southern Hemisphere fisheries.

Curiosity uncovers election hack

October 15, 2017

Routine monitoring of the Bird of the Year election by Yvan Richard uncovered fraudulent voting in the competition last week. The discovery was picked up by media worldwide and “ruffled a few feathers” in New Zealand as well.

We’ve moved (but not very far)

October 03, 2017

Dragonfly Data Science is now located on level 4 of 158 Victoria St, instead of level 5. “It’s a floor down but a size up, so we now have a dedicated meeting area and our own kitchen, as well as more desk space,” says Edward.

Keeping track of Kākāpō

August 14, 2017

Kākāpō, New Zealand’s large, flightless, nocturnal parrots generate few offspring but much data. The whole population of about 150 birds is intensively managed and monitored on several pest free offshore islands. The birds’ weight, breeding and mating activity, and blood and poo sample results are currently recorded in a database that has to cope with increasing amounts of data.

Protected species captures in New Zealand fisheries

August 04, 2017

The latest estimate of the number of seabirds caught in New Zealand’s fisheries has been released by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). The protected species capture data for the year ending September 2016 is now available via a Dragonfly website.

Data science + genomics

August 03, 2017

Genomics, the study of genomes (the complete set of genetic material within an organism), is a relatively new field of science that is generating vast quantities of data.

A little story about Dragonfly

June 27, 2017

Edward gave a talk called ‘Growing your own science organisation’, at the New Zealand Association of Scientists annual conference on 21 June. He personalised the presentation by using only photos from his phone.

Sharing our best practice

May 23, 2017

Plant & Food Research is hosting a two-day conference later this week, where Finlay Thompson will talk about Dragonfly’s commitment to reproducible research.

Seabird champions meet in Vietnam

April 19, 2017

Edward Abraham represented New Zealand at a workshop aimed at combining efforts to reduce seabird bycatch in the world’s tuna fisheries. Held in Hoi An, this was the second pre-assessment workshop organised by BirdLife South Africa, one of the partners of the Common Oceans ABNJ Tuna Project.

Oreti Beach toheroa survey

March 25, 2017

Concern over the fall in juvenile toheroa numbers reported in Dragonfly’s 2013 survey prompted a follow-up survey of Oreti Beach this summer. The survey was funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) with co-funding from Waihōpai Rūnaka, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, Environment Southland, the Department of Conservation and Invercargill City Council.

Farewell Chris Knox

March 14, 2017

After four years and two children, Chris is leaving Dragonfly to take up a position as a data journalist at the New Zealand Herald, based in Wellington.

Tooth and Claw snags young locals

November 25, 2016

A website created by Dragonfly to record observations of pest animals on Otago Peninsula was given the thumbs up by local children after a busy spring. The project, Backyard Biodiversity, saw children monitoring pests around their homes and schools and recording it on the Tooth and Claw website.

Helping save turtles in the Pacific

November 17, 2016

Dragonfly provided technical support to a workshop convened by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) under the Common Oceans Tuna Project, which met in Hawaii recently. The group was considering which mitigation methods would be most effective at reducing bycatch for sea turtles, but lacked a reliable map of turtle abundance.

Kōkako among supreme winners at annual Best Design Awards

October 17, 2016

The Kōkako application was awarded a Purple Pin at the 2016 New Zealand design awards held last Friday night in Auckland. The award recognised Kōkako as the best entry in the interactive application category, including websites and mobile applications.

Kōkako featured on Native Affairs, Māori Television

September 19, 2016

The Māori language software Kōkako features on Native Affairs and is in the running for a New Zealand design award.

Dragonfly’s remote southern office

September 12, 2016

Fast electronic communication with the team in Wellington and good workflow processes enable staff member Dr Katrin Berkenbusch to live and work happily from her home on Otago Peninsula.

“I feel like I live in paradise! I think the peninsula is a really special, beautiful place. I enjoy the wilderness of nature here but also access to a city in close proximity. It’s the best of both worlds,” she says.

A sabbatical in Denmark

July 25, 2016

Philipp Neubauer has just headed off to spend a month in Denmark working on his Marsden Fast-Start project. The attraction goes beyond the European summer and historic castle setting, to a research collaboration that could help New Zealand fisheries build resilience to climate change.

Machine learning in the cloud

June 13, 2016

Edward has been invited to talk at a Catalyst Cloud breakfast about how Dragonfly’s Kōkako technology makes use of the cloud computing platform. Kōkako uses machine learning to monitor the proportion of Māori language broadcast on New Zealand’s iwi radio stations.

Pest monitoring by curious minds

May 20, 2016

Dragonfly has combined forces with the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group to teach primary-school children how to monitor pests in the Dunedin area.

Mapping the cadmium in New Zealand soils

May 09, 2016

In a project for the Fertiliser Association Industry of New Zealand, Edward mapped the cadmium content of 1980 soil samples from across New Zealand. He found clearly elevated concentrations in Taranaki and Waikato.

Shellfish surveys – a smarter approach

April 11, 2016

Beaches in northern New Zealand have been monitored regularly for cockles and pipi (bivalves) since the early 1990s. Dragonfly took on the surveys two years ago and has now also completed an analysis of all the data collected from the 12 beaches in the past 15 years.

Include Regional Economic Activity charts in your website

March 11, 2016

Chris built a nifty feature into the website for the Regional Economic Activity Report (REAR) that lets you embed selected maps or charts into your own website. The embed feature has been used by New Zealand Herald in the data insights pages.

Latest regional GDP data added to the Regional Economic Activity Report

March 09, 2016

New Zealand’s regional gross domestic product data, for the year ended March 2015, are now available via the Regional Economic Activity Report (REAR) website developed by Dragonfly.

Report back from eResearch 2016

February 15, 2016

A highlight for Finlay of the recent Queenstown eResearch conference, was hearing the wider research community endorse the value of the principles and methods that are central to how Dragonfly operates.

Shellfish surveys show beach closures are working

December 14, 2015

Annual cockle and pipi surveys of 12 beaches in northern New Zealand show that beach closures are effective at halting declines in cockle numbers.

Overlap between black petrel and fisheries

November 09, 2015

Dragonfly has published a report estimating where the range of black petrel overlaps with commercial trawl and longline fisheries in northern New Zealand. The greatest overlap with fisheries is on the shelf edge to the north of Great Barrier (Aotea) Island.

Kei hea koe?

November 07, 2015

Where are you? Kei Pōneke au! I’m in Wellington! Weekly lessons in te reo Māori are happening at Dragonfly at the moment. Read more

Theo's eggs

October 30, 2015

Philipp Neubauer keeps the Dragonfly staff supplied with eggs from his lifestyle block in the Wairarapa, about an hour by train from Wellington.

His son Theo, aged “four and three quarters”, decorates the boxes with his drawings of spaceships, roosters, eggs and Pippi Longstocking.

Working out who's eating who

September 29, 2015

A statistical method for analysing predator-prey relationships was developed by Philipp Neubauer. The method will be used to study the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on marine ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico. The approach was developed collaboratively with Olaf Jensen, at Rutgers University, and Olaf is continuing to expand the use of this analysis.

Author prediction win for Douglas

September 28, 2015

Dragonfly associate Douglas Bagnall recently won a software competition to correctly predict the author of 100 or more pieces of text in each of four languages. The evaluation lab competition is run annually as part of the PAN conference, (plagiarism, authorship and social software misuse). In 2015 there were 18 entries, including some from large university research groups.

New website for Dragonfly

September 08, 2015

Dragonfly launched a new website in September, which incorporates its updated brand Dragonfly Data Science.

“Although we’ve been using the brand on our printed reports for a while already, this is the first time its been used on our website. We chose ‘data science’ because it’s a broad term that captures the whole range of what we do,” says Finlay.

Kōkako for language monitoring

September 04, 2015

Dragonfly’s innovative technology to digitally monitor the proportion of Māori language broadcast on radio and television has been branded as Kōkako.

A rare New Zealand songbird, the kōkako (core-kar-coh) has an evocative flute-like call, as its onomatopoeic Māori name suggests. Edward felt the sound quality of the word, as well as the bird’s uniqueness, was right for their successful world-first project.

The Regional Economic Activity Report gets interactive

June 11, 2014

Dragonfly has created an interactive web tool to present information on population, employment, GDP and annual household income across the country's 66 territorial authorities for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).

It is available from the MBIE website in desktop and tablet versions, and an app is planned.

Dragonfly featured on ABC and BBC radio programmes

February 14, 2014

Dragonfly's work for the Paua Industry Council, using data loggers to manage the pāua fishery, was featured on the ABC's Off Track and the BBC's Discovery programmes this week.

Edward, along with Dave and Jason Baker, discuss the development of the data loggers and the benefits to the fishers. This programme is part two of a four-part series exploring current marine issues around the world.

Working at the beach this summer

January 15, 2014

Dragonfly are surveying cockle and pipi populations in the wider Auckland region and toheroa in Southland for the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).

The work in northern New Zealand is currently underway, with Katrin leading the project. “I’m a soft-sediment ecologist so it’s a good opportunity to get into this kind of work and make use of my skills. We’re sampling a range of beaches, inlets and estuaries, from the Bay of Plenty to Whangarei.”

The BBC and the ABC come to town

November 19, 2013

Julian Siddle from the BBC Radio Science Unit and Joel Werner from the ABC visited Dragonfly last week, to record interviews as part of a radio series on the marine environment.

The four 25-minute programmes feature positive stories about people who are solving problems using science and data-driven approaches.

Philipp presenting at the Oxford University Biodiversity Resilience symposium

September 27, 2013

Philipp is off to Oxford on Monday to present on the resilience of fished populations at the Biodiversity Resilience symposium. Phil's talk is entitled: The end of the line? Patterns and mechanisms of resilience in overfished stocks.

Inferring animal dispersal from geochemical proxies: open source R package online

September 11, 2013

To pinpoint the origins of settling fish in Cook Strait, near Wellington, Philipp measured geochemical signatures in fish otoliths (ear bones). A new Bayesian modelling approach allowed him to estimate dispersal of larval fish among local populations in the region. These models are now available in an open-source package for the statistical computing environment R.

Podcast - bycatch data analysis

August 07, 2013

Edward and Finlay talk to Alison Ballance from Our Changing World, Radio New Zealand National about their analysis of seabird and marine mammal bycatch data collected by observers on fishing vessels.

The data informed the Ministry for Primary Industries' National Plan of Action for Seabirds 2013, which aims to ensure that ‘New Zealand seabirds thrive without pressure from fishing related mortalities, New Zealand fishers avoid or mitigate against seabird captures and New Zealand fisheries are globally recognised as seabird friendly.’

Taiaroa Head colony perfect for albatross study

August 01, 2013

The northern royal albatross colony at Taiaroa Head has been used to estimate the birds’ survival rates at different ages in a single model. The new estimate by Dragonfly updates the survival rate calculation from 1993, which was based on re-sighting data from 1937–1993.

Since then, a number of things have changed – climate and marine conditions, population size and the distribution of fishing effort – and better analysis methods are available.

Resilience of the world's fish stocks

April 29, 2013

Philipp Neubauer, who is due to start work at Dragonfly in August, has published a paper modelling the recovery of the world’s fish stocks from overfishing in the journal Science this month. The full paper may be accessed via the publications page of the RAM legacy stock-assessment database.

“We found that marine fish populations were surprisingly resilient to overfishing and could generally rebuild to sustainable levels within a decade or so – if fishing was reduced substantially at the first signs of overexploitation,” he says.

Seabird bycatch data goes public

February 27, 2013

Fisheries observer data on the capture of seabirds in New Zealand trawl and longline fisheries from 2002–03 to 2010–11 have recently been made available through a web interface.

The website was developed by Dragonfly for the Ministry for Primary Industries and is searchable by year, species, region and fishing method, with results displayed in a clear graphical format.

Like some talk with your sushi?

February 15, 2013

Last week we held our first official lunchtime technical talk. We started the series to connect with others in Wellington who are interested in the same kind of 'bright and shiny things' that interest us. The next talk will be by Joel Pitt who will give a 'Beginner's guide to information theory', on February 28, starting at 12:15.

Doing our bit to reverse the brain drain

February 01, 2013

Christopher Knox recently joined the Dragonfly team as a visualisation scientist. Originally from Christchurch, he spent 10 years overseas, most recently in Saudi Arabia.

Although Chris and his wife were planning to return to New Zealand eventually, the offer of a job with Dragonfly was the catalyst they needed to make the move home.

Joining the dots for pāua fishers

November 29, 2012

Tom McCowan, a PhD student working for the Pāua Industry Council Ltd (PIC), is currently being housed at Dragonfly.

Tom's job is to get the pāua dive-logger programme up and running nationwide - the next step from the proof-of-concept stage. The dive loggers collect detailed data on diver location and catch, and the programme will ultimately give fishers access to up-to-date information on the state of the fishery, reef by reef. The loggers are currently being widely used in the Marlborough and Chatham Islands areas.

An interesting (and extremely useful) character turns up

November 28, 2012

Dr Joel Pitt is at Dragonfly for the next few months, doing contract work developing websites and back-end systems. Joel describes himself as part scientist, part software engineer, and fascinated with artificial intelligence and consciousness.

“I’ve been working in a business setting for the last year, so it’s great to be able to just focus on code again,” he says.

Flesh-footed shearwaters caught by recreational fishers

November 07, 2012

Collecting dead birds from Bay of Plenty beaches after the Rena grounding showed that not all the deaths were caused by the 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil that leaked from the vessel.

The team that handled more than 2000 oiled birds also found 64 unoiled flesh-footed shearwaters that were in good body condition, and found evidence that some had apparently been killed as a result of interactions with recreational fishers.

Dragonfly grows database and programming expertise

July 18, 2012

The appointment of Richard Mansfield to the Dragonfly team brings some complementary programming and web development expertise to the company. Previously from Catalyst IT, Richard is a specialist in open source software development for the web.

More robins released near Eastbourne

June 20, 2012

More than 70 people were involved in the translocation of 40 North Island robins from Kapiti Island to the hills behind Eastbourne in April as part of the MIRO (Mainland Island Restoration Operation) project run by volunteers.

Yvan from Dragonfly was one of eight ‘catchers’ on Kapiti Island. He studied robins during his PhD and became expert at catching them, so was pleased to be able to help out.

Mapping pāua catch with GPS

June 13, 2012

The Paua Industry Council (PIC) has been developing data logging technology for fisheries management for a number of years, but recently got Dragonfly involved to analyse their data, extract the relevant information and present it in a useful way.

A Marlborough-based pāua fishing company, Saavid Fishing Ltd, has monitored its fishery using GPS-based technology for some years, and helped develop and trial a number of different data logging units for PIC. Read more

Better communication by design

June 08, 2012

Design students from Massey University are again looking for ways to improve communication of the complex issues around fishing bycatch, focussing on our fur seals, white-capped albatross and black petrels.

The project is a 4th year Information Design paper, taken as part of a Bachelor of Design (Hons). Students are challenged to take the raw data provided by Dragonfly, and translate it into a relevant graphic form for a selected audience.

Counting kiwis

June 05, 2012

Simon Morton spoke to Stu Cockburn from the Department of Conservation and Edward from Dragonfly about their project monitoring North Island brown kiwi in the Rimutaka Forest Park on This Way Up, Radio New Zealand National. Susan Ellis from the Rimutaka Forest Park Trust was also interviewed.

Reducing incidental captures of seabirds in inshore fisheries

March 14, 2012

In recent years, awareness of seabird bycatch in inshore fisheries has grown considerably. A recent expert workshop run by the Department of Conservation and Ministry of Fisheries, and attended by Dragonfly, discussed bycatch reduction measures for inshore trawl and bottom longline fisheries.

Johanna Pierre joins Dragonfly

February 01, 2012

Having worked together on several protected species projects in the last seven years, Johanna Pierre is joining Dragonfly Science this month. She will also maintain her private consultancy, JPEC.

“I have enjoyed the projects I’ve worked on with Edward and Finlay, and am looking forward to joining forces with them”, she says.

Seabird estimation report published

November 02, 2011

A recent Aquatic Environment and Biodiversity Report estimates the number of seabirds captured during commercial fishing in New Zealand waters between 2002–03 and 2008–09.

In New Zealand, government observers are present on some vessels and record any captures of seabirds and other protected species that occur. This study estimated the total numbers of seabirds that would have been reported if observers had been present on every fishing vessel.

Making connections in Japan

October 04, 2011

Finlay Thompson from Dragonfly travelled to Tokyo in September to attend two conferences hosted by the National Institute of Informatics and meet collaborators in the Parallel GHC project. The visit was also an opportunity to build networks in the high performance computing communities.

Seabirds on the menu

August 10, 2011

Dragonfly staff attended the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society conference, held in Oban on Stewart Island from 5-8 July.

Getting to the island entailed travelling through Bluff, one of the few places where sooty shearwater pies may be bought for lunch.

Estimated sea lion bycatch in 2008–09

April 13, 2011

Dragonfly estimated that around 78 sea lions were caught in New Zealand trawl fisheries in the 2008-09 fishing year. This was the lowest number of estimated captures since 2002-03.

The estimates, based on observer reported captures, were made for trawls targeting squid, southern blue whiting and other species near Auckland Island, Campbell Island and the southern end of the Stewart-Snares shelf. The estimate includes sea lions that may have escaped from the net through sea lion exclusion devices.

Common dolphin captures in 2008–09

December 01, 2010

Estimates of common dolphin bycatch in the the jack mackerel trawl fishery over a 13-year period were recently published by Dragonfly in a report based on data from 1995 to 2009. Common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) are the most frequently observed cetacean caught in New Zealand trawl fisheries.