February | 2024 | Keith Armstrong 2024

Preamble

On 27th Feb, I accompanied one of my science collaborators Dr. Eleanor Velasquez – who is also our partner TERN’s (Terrestrial Ecology Research Network) Education Manager, to meet with her colleagues Arun Singh Ramesh, Lachlan Charles and Javier Sanchez Gonzalez <Zooming from Madrid> at TERN HQ @University of Qld Long Pocket, Brisbane.

Meeting the TERN team on and offline in Brisbane, Feb 2024 (Image Keith Armstrong)

The meeting was primarily to discuss the data access and visualisation facilities that TERN offer.

We discussed all of the following data types that may be available to us going forward : –

Overview of TERN processes (Image courtesy of TERN)

TERN Landscapes / Land Observatory engages in Environmental reporting using remote sensing that is consistent across all sites. “TERN’s Landscape Monitoring platform conducts environmental monitoring and landscape observation using remote sensing techniques to characterise and monitor Australian ecosystems over time at a landscape and continental scale. The platform also undertakes specific modelling and synthesis activities (for clients) to extrapolate and interpolate from observational data to produce modelled data products”.

Data Types:

Vegetation Structure and Change – Land cover, seasonal fractional cover (bare, green and non-green cover), uses quarterly time scales (3-month)

Soil – soil physicochemical attributes, lithology, soil organic carbon, pH, water availability, etc.

maps.tern.org.au (A landscape visualiser tool)

TERN Landscape visualiser – in this case ‘pyrogeography’ readings (Image courtesy of TERN)

This area of their folio engages: Land cover dynamics and phenology (i.e. the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life), Vegetation composition and diversity, Fire dynamics and impacts, Vegetation structural properties and Biomass, Field survey datasets, Airborne datasets, Corrected surface reflectance products and other environmental and landscape research data such as solar radiation, rainfall, and water vapour pressure.

TERN Ecosystem Surveillance
This element of TERN’s capacity involves a range of measurement and recording types – such as the use of LIDAR to scan environments and the collection of CO2 data from Eddy Covariance flux towers. This area tracks the direction and magnitude of change in Australia’s environments over time, through sampling and surveying flora, soil and some invertebrates.

•Plot-based survey – uses 1ha plot

•Standardized protocol to monitor vegetation and soil attributes at
plot-level (e.g. AusPlots)

•Surveillance monitoring for the Ecological Monitoring System
Australia (EMSA) – DCCEEW

ecoplots.tern.org.au

TERN Ecoplots Lead Page (Image courtesy of TERN)

TERN Ecosystem Processes
TERN’s Ecosystem Processes platform monitors the environment at a high level of detail at a small number of representative sites/key Australian biomes (called Super Sites) – of which TERN is one – categorised as a peri-urban site.

Micrometerorological and land-surface and atmospheric processes – Sensor and flux data

•Vegetation CO2 and H2O fluxes

•Phenocams – phenology

Ozflux-tern/ ecoimages.tern.org.au

ecoimages.tern.org.au

Random phenocam image of the artwork site from 2015 – (longer grass is the area that was burnt in 2023) (Image courtesy TERN)

Clearly these data set types offer a host of possibilities. The data set is predominantly numerical data although images also exist – and therefore suggests the need for computational analysis going forward.

At this stage the LIDAR data held, the historic data from SERF (e.g. the super site readings and the phenocams) and the atmospheric data may be of future interest to this project. I would expect further discussion in the future as more specific pointers to the need for such data may emerge. Thank you for the team at TERN and Dr. Eleanor Velasquez for making the visit so successful 🙂

Thrilled to begin this project – and to speak to some of the ideas and discoveries along the way – I trust it will be both a useful personal journal and of interest to others who may wish to engage in similar journeys 🙂

The Project Site :Image courtesy of QUT REF – Research Engineering Facility

Forest Art Intelligence (FAI) aims to understand how to develop art forms capable of growing and evolving alongside a regenerating forest, whilst also actively benefiting that forest’s health: in collaboration with Samford Ecological Research Facility (SERF) and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN).

The extraordinary intelligences that underpin natural systems will inspire and direct the development of our experimental sci-art process. Our aim is to understand how to develop art forms capable of growing and evolving alongside a regenerating forest, whilst also actively benefiting that forest’s health. We envisage embedded artworks capable of slowly finding, and then occupying, their own intelligent ‘niches’, within the forest’s ecology – a speculative form we call an ‘Art Intelligence’.

Eucalypt Trees set within grassy woodland — Samford Ecological Research Facility Forest Edge (Image Keith Armstrong)

Our art+science team have secured unprecedented permission to restore a currently cleared block of land back to high conservation-value forest at the partner’s site, Samford Ecological Research facility (SERF). As the forest ecology slowly returns to health, we will investigate how to develop symbiotic, process-based artworks across that entire site. We imagine that these ‘Art Intelligences’, would be capable of growing & evolving with the forest whilst occupying their own intelligent, ecological ‘niches’ within that emerging forest – with the forest itself being the project’s ‘meta-artwork’.

Our project’s actions, & our on-site creations are therefore intended to directly benefit the forest through both ‘performing’ ecological functions, whilst also encouraging public engagement with the forest’s processes of intelligent natural regrowth.

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