Dr Jenna Wraith1, Dr Renuka Sharma1, Jo Morris2
1QCIF- Sustainable Futures, Brisbane, Australia, 2ARDC, Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Dr Jenna Wraith is a conservation scientist and technologist leading the Sustainable Futures Department at QCIF, a not-for-profit organisation advancing digital infrastructure for research. She holds a PhD in plant conservation and specialises in developing national-scale tools for biodiversity research, including species distribution modelling, wildlife monitoring, and the use of artificial intelligence in ecological science. Jenna’s work bridges environmental research and technology, supporting data-driven decision-making for conservation. Based on Yugambeh Country (Gold Coast, Australia), she is passionate about making advanced tools more accessible and building inclusive, collaborative approaches to eResearch.
Abstract:
Australia is facing urgent environmental challenges including biodiversity loss, climate change, and increasing pressure on land and ecosystems. Responding to these requires robust infrastructure and collaboration across research, government, and the environmental sector. QCIF Sustainable Futures, which includes the EcoCommons platform and the Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs), provides national-scale infrastructure to support scalable, transparent, and reproducible ecological modelling and wildlife monitoring.
EcoCommons is a cloud-based platform that empowers researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to build and share ecological models using open-access data and validated, scalable Jupyter notebooks. These workflows enable species distribution modelling, climate change projections, and conservation planning, promoting transparency and accessibility for users of all skill levels. WildObs complements EcoCommons by providing infrastructure for automated analysis of camera trap images using advanced computer vision to detect and identify species. This supports long-term biodiversity monitoring and data requirements for national initiatives such as the Threatened Species Index and environmental reporting.
These platforms are built through strong, ongoing collaboration with partners across Australia’s research infrastructure ecosystem such as the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and align with FAIR data standards and emerging data trends. Together, they combine ecological expertise with digital innovation to enable high-throughput environmental science that strengthens biodiversity reporting, land-use decisions, and climate adaptation strategies. By connecting data, infrastructure, and people, the Sustainable Futures portfolio showcases the value of shared vision and partnership. It equips Australia’s research community to respond to biodiversity and climate challenges and enables scalable, community-driven science.