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bhimanyu Raj Singh still remembers the butterflies. Growing up near Panna in Madhya Pradesh, he was walking near Panna National Park when he came upon hundreds of them, not flying or feeding on flowers but sitting on the ground.
“I’d always seen them flying, sitting on flowers,” he recalls. “So I was curious, why ground?”
That curiosity eventually led him to ecology, a master’s degree in Brisbane and to EcoCommons Australia, a cloud-based platform bringing together thousands of environmental datasets.
This September, EcoCommons won a 2026 Australian Museum Eureka Prize, Australia’s premier science awards, in the Data Platforms category.
Singh, a Data Ecologist at QCIF, immediately deflects the credit. “No, no, I will not take the credit,” he says. “It’s an entire team,” pointing particularly to the software developers and collaborators behind the platform.
Singh arrived in Australia in February 2020. His journey into ecology began with a bachelor’s degree in zoology in India and a fascination with population modelling, field surveys and the relationships between species.
“I see ecology as psychology,” he says. “Psychology tells how relationships work, how you are feeling, how you are connecting dependencies. Ecology is kind of similar. I call it plant and animal psychology.”
He volunteered on citizen science projects, vulture and tiger surveys and plantation drives. With NGO Samavesh, he helped take science to remote village schools in a van painted with diagrams of natural cycles.
“Your van is your blackboard,” he recalls. “All the kids would come out, sit on the ground, and you’d just take a pointer and point to the van and talk about the cycles.”
The experience reinforced something he still believes: science is of little use if it doesn’t reach the people who need it.
After completing a master’s in Environmental Protection and Climate Change Adaptation at Griffith University, Singh joined QCIF, where ecology and data came together.
EcoCommons addresses a problem he describes simply as “time consumption”. Researchers building species distribution models can spend weeks gathering and preparing data, learning coding and running computational methods. EcoCommons brings environmental datasets and analytical tools together, allowing some analyses to be completed in around seven minutes.
“It’s that fast,” Singh says. More than 2,000 researchers and government agencies use the platform to model where species might move under climate change, identify conservation priorities and assess future habitat suitability.
One striking example involves the endangered Eastern Bristlebird. Its northern population, across New South Wales and Queensland, had fewer than 20 known individuals, Singh says, and conservation groups had struggled to locate more.
EcoCommons combined known locations with information about the bird’s habitat to predict where undiscovered individuals might be found. Field ecologists then installed acoustic sensors in targeted areas to listen for their calls. Within six months, Singh says, new individuals had been detected.
For him, conserving species comes down to interconnection. “If you take out a species from a landscape, then landscape changes. Ecology connects not only wildlife but human and animal health, food, farming, agriculture and wellbeing.
When EcoCommons was nominated for the Eureka Prize, Singh didn’t expect to win. He knew they were competing against major universities and believed biodiversity and ecology often received less attention than fields such as health science.
Then their name was announced. “I literally shouted,” he says. “We left all the good manners.”
Now he is looking towards connectivity ecology—using data to understand how species move between habitats, where migrating animals stop and whether those places provide the food and conditions they need.
“We need to strengthen these connections,” he says.
It seems a fitting next step for someone whose career began with a simple question about butterflies and has grown into a search for the connections hidden within nature.
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