Florian builds pipelines along the value chain of data, information and knowledge from scientific monitoring and research into the ears of management.
Florian's mission is to get the best management bang for the invested scientific buck.
Research Scientist Ecoinformatics at Western Australian Department of Parks and Wildlife
April 2010 - Present
CKAN data catalogue: Installation, customisation, governance and training to Departmental staff, automated, data-driven, collaboratively edited, web-based reporting solution with open source template "CKAN o' Sweave".
Information management: Making environmental data sets from long term monitoring projects discoverable and accessible through web services and metadata catalogues; design and implementation of collaboration tools for knowledge, literature, business processes, bulk data storage, semantic annotation of data and references.
Software design: Development of a web portal for project management, documentation, spatial referencing and approval trail in a corporate environment; scientific programming for statistical analysis and reporting work flows.
Technology communication: educating researchers and business managers towards a paradigm shift in information management work flows; introducing standards and best practices into existing work flows and paradigms.
Contributions to various open source software packages in the CKAN and R ecosystem.
Research Scientist (Ecoinformatics) at Landgate
August 2015 - October 2015 (3 months)
Seconded to Landgate, Florian has built the first version http://catalogue.beta.data.wa.gov.au/ as the central data catalogue for Western Austalian Government agencies behind http://data.wa.gov.au/, and documented the build at http://datawagovau.readthedocs.io/.
Research Associate at Murdoch University
November 2008 - January 2010 (1 year 3 months)
Spatial modelling of recreational tourism in the Ningaloo Marine Park (Western Autralia); spatial data management and GIS analysis: What drives recreational coastal usage patterns at Ningaloo? Using spatial statistics (Principal Coordinate Analysis of Neighbourhood Matrices), Florian was able to explain 15% more variance in data than with known explanatory variables alone (30%). Florian also paved the gravel road to Gnaraloo station, a highly desirable but very remote and accommodation-limited surfing, snorkelling and diving paradise, thereby flooding it with day-tripping tourists from the nearby accommodation-rich city Carnarvon - luckily, this happened only in a simulation.
Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München / University of Munich
Diplom (BSc Hons equiv.), Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Computer Science, 2000 - 2005
Turtle Strandings
The WA Strandings Database WAStD/TSC handles turtle (and possibly other) strandings (and other related observations), integrates mobile data capture, offers QA, and provides data through a self-documenting API to in-house analysts.
Reporting infrastructure for complex, collaboratively authored, data-driven reports
"To R is human - to Sweave, divine." Collaboratively writing data-driven scientific reports combining scientific programming, desktop publishing and version control with a CKAN data catalogue.
Code and Presentation; Example: Marine Science MPA reports (currently retired)
Data Science server stack template
An example data science server stack, consisting of a CKAN data catalogue, an R Studio Server (statistical programming IDE), and R Shiny Server, complete with instructions for setup and deployment to AWS. During his secondment to Landgate, Florian has refined the template, and implemented it as http://catalogue.beta.data.wa.gov.au/, the data catalogue behind http://data.wa.gov.au/.
Documentation and WA Data portal, DPaW's Internal data catalog
Project documentation, approval, and reporting portal
SDIS is the result of four years of full stack web development, fighting the eternal struggle to keep test coverage up and technical debt down. SDIS incorporates lessons learnt about writing industrial strength code and looking over the shoulders of the Department's brightest programmers.
SDIS has brought a paradigm shift into Science and Conservation Division, moving away from emailing Word documents towards collaborating online.
Fossette S, Loewenthal G, Peel LR, Vitenbergs A, Hamel MA, Douglas C et al. [Tucker AD, Mayer F, Whiting SD] (2021). Using aerial photogrammetry to assess stock-wide marine turtle nesting distribution, abundance and cumulative exposure to industrial activity. Remote Sensing 13,
Mayer F (2020). ruODK: an R client for the ODK Central API: software reference manual, version 0.9.0. Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, Kensington, WA. 89 p.
Fossette-Halot S, Loewenthal G, Tucker T, Mayer F, Whiting S (2019). A cumulative risk assessment framework to prioritize management actions for Western Australia flatback turtles (ABSTRACT). In AMSA 2019: Marine Science for a Blue Economy, 7-11 July 2019, Fremantle, Perth: Program Handbook p. 92
Fossette-Halot S, Loewenthal G, Tucker T, Mayer F, Whiting S (2018). Planning for the future: a broad-scale risk assessment of multiple anthropogenic threats to flatback turtles (ABSTRACT). In 5th International Marine Conservation Congress, 2018, 24th-29th June, Kuching, Sarawak: conference programme p. 1
Pacioni C, Mayer F (2017). vortexR: an R package for post Vortex simulation analysis. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 8, pp. 1477–1481
