Koala tracker: Alex Harris at TEDxNoosa 2014

Alex Harris: Koala Tracker
Bio: Alex Harris has had a career in the media and public relations industries in Australia and the United States. The founding editor and publisher of North America's first finance and business journal for women, Alex won the Chicago Women in Publishing award in 1994 and the National Association of Women Business Owners New Venture Award in 1995.
She is the creator of the national crowd sourced koala map, KoalaTracker.com.au, putting the location of alive, dead and injured koalas, points of impacts and causes of death and injury on the map for the public record.

Alex holds an Australian Innovation Patent, awarded in 2002 for an online business process, and won the ESRI Australia GIS in Community award 2010.
A resident of Noosa for 12 years, Alex is today a real estate agent with Ray White Noosa River, and continues to volunteer with KoalaTracker.com.au and Bob Irwin Wildlife and Conservation Foundation Inc.

Title: How to become a spatial and wildlife scientist in 3 minutes or less
Synopsis: What do you know about koalas? Our assumptions are about to be challenged. The great void of data that caused the Threatened Species Scientific Committee to recommend against listing the koala as endangered, is being filled with information from citizen scientists around the country in largest and longest running crowdsourced mapping projects in Australia. KoalaTracker is proving a model for community involvement in urban planning and conservation, giving us the tools and power to create space for koalas.

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