Digitising local knowledge

Cassowary conservation in Mission Beach rests on decades of fieldwork, research and thousands of community sightings. That knowledge was spread across spreadsheets, paper records and memory, and hard to reach.

With Mission Beach Cassowaries, we built Cassie, an AI tool trained on decades of community cassowary data that makes local knowledge accessible through natural conversation. The team also gained the AI skills to maintain and expand Cassie over time.

Decades of distributed knowledge became reachable through conversation, the team could ask complex questions and get contextual answers quickly, local AI confidence grew, and the work opened new approaches to storytelling and advocacy.