Australian scientists are turning to crowdsourcing to help undertake the massive task of cataloguing Australia’s flora and fauna.
About three quarters of our species are unknown or unidentified, so a website has been launched that allows ‘citizen scientists’ to report plant and animal sightings in their area.
The Atlas of Living Australia is recording sightings of flora and fauna, and can take contributions from the public. It features downloadable distribution charts, identification tools, images, scientific literature and data sets that provide as complete a picture as possible about each species. Eventually, DNA barcoding will also be added.
The atlas was launched late last year and already contains more than 23 million records from museums and data collections around the country.
But digitising Australia's wildlife records is a massive task, so the atlas team is encouraging the public to upload their own field notes, sightings and photographs to the encyclopaedia's citizen science portal.
"In most of our cities, particularly the suburbs, there really is a lot of very interesting wildlife that can be seen," says Donald Hobern, director of the Atlas project, told Australian Geographic. "There are lots of species that are very recognisable, but our current understanding of their present-day distributions may be very patchy."
Even reporting the sighting of a common bird can help in better understanding the distribution of the species, or if it is being affected by climate change.
"Understanding when different plants come into flower, or whether birds are arriving in areas earlier than they used to under climate change – those are the sorts of things that observations from the public can very easily contribute to," he says.
