How to save a dinosaur bird

For over 30 years, locals and visitors to Mission Beach have been reporting cassowary sightings, recording them in paper logbooks, spreadsheets, and community noticeboards.

These ancient birds are a keystone species in the Wet Tropics, but the knowledge held by the community was disconnected, hard to use, and at risk of being lost.

With renewed interest in citizen science and biodiversity markets, there was a need to transform these observations into a living, useful dataset.

Heaps Smart partnered with Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation (C4) to digitise three decades of cassowary sightings. Together, we built an automated database to catalogue new and historic records, created simple logging tools for the public, and designed a notification system to keep contributors informed and engaged. The system makes it easy to collect sightings from multiple sources — including social media, forms, and emails — and collates them into a clean, structured database ready for conservation use.

We're now developing an open-data platform to make cassowary sightings visible and usable for conservationists, planners, and researchers. Future features will include image analysis to help identify individual birds and track their movement across the landscape — helping protect one of Australia’s most iconic and endangered species.