Cover article in MEE
Our paper and ‘tiny earth’ image is featured is on the cover of the March 2025 edition of MEE
My colleague Nunzio Knerr and I have just been lucky enough to have our paper ‘Rapid ecological data collection from 360-degree imagery using visualisation and immersive sampling in the R pannotator package’ published in the March edition of the journal Methods and Ecology and Evolution (vol. 16, pp. 640-654; https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14472). And our image was selected to be on the cover! This is a first for both of us, and it is very exciting to see our work featured prominently in such a great journal.
The cover image was taken with a GoPro Max 360-degree camera near Uluru (Ayers Rock) in central Australia in 2022, and shows the ‘tiny earth’ that results when you map the entire panospheric image onto a flat plane. The image was taken in spinifex (Triodia spp.) grassland and you can see blacked areas killed by drought in 2018-2020; also visible is dead mulga (Acacia aneura) to the left and Uluru at the top right.
The image was taken as part of a large collaborative study between CSIRO, Parks Australia and local Anangu people undertaken to investigate the impact of the severe 2017-2020 drought on native vegetation across Ulruru-Kata Tjuta National Park. When visiting the region in 2022 it became clear that dieback of trees, shrubs and spinifex grasses had occurred on such a massive spatial scale, and across so many species, that we were simply incapable of capturing sufficient data to map affected areas using traditional ecological field survey techniques.
To solve this problem we devised a technique for rapidly surveying vegetation and landscapes using 360-degree cameras, and then developed a new R software package (panoramic image annotator in R - pannotator) that allowed us to visualise panospheric images in panoramic mode, map the location of each image, and annotate the images with ecological data using customisable drop-down menus. The resulting data can be exported and then used for a wide variety of spatial mapping and data analytical purposes.
The use of 360-degree cameras and the pannotator package have revolutionized our ecological research by making it easy to collect the very large amounts of data necessary to map vegetation and landscape features across very large spatial scales. Indeed, in just 3 days we were able to enough images to map dieback for multiple species at 10 m x 10 m resolution across a 2,000 km2 study area centred on Ulruru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Our paper dives into the technical details of how we leveraged this technology to achieve this goal, and offers a new perspective on ecological sampling that we hope will inspire further research in the field.
In coming months I will be developing a series of posts and tutorials using this approach, so stay tuned!