The Atlas of Living Australia is a joint initiative to build a national database of our flora and fauna. The project brings together a huge array of information on Australia’s biodiversity, accessible through a single website. Partners in this collaborative project include CSIRO, museums, herbaria, other biological collections, the Australian Government and the community.
The aim of the Atlas is to improve the linkages between all forms of information about Australian plants, animals and microorganisms and to organise this information in ways which support the needs of research scientists, policy makers, naturalists and others.
Biodiversity information includes reference lists of species in different groups; databases of information on specimens held in natural history collections; databases of field observations from ecologists, naturalists and others; images and other multimedia; published literature (including digital versions); molecular data sets; identification keys; and a wide range of other databases and web sites.
Lee Belbin, team leader of Spatial Data Management at the Atlas of Living Australia told attendees at spatial@gov some of the technology behind the $65 million project.
The project is based entirely on FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and is managed through a Google Code environment. Most of the data held in the Atlas is freely available through a CC_BY license, with the team working towards making all the data available under CC-BY.
Some of the software used includes: Java ZK, Cassandra/SOLR, PostGIS, Geoserver, Open Layers, and GeoNetwork.
The service was designed to have most functions implemented as web services that are accessible using simple URLs. All the records in the database have publicly available unique identifiers, aiding in this accessibility.
The Atlas also provides powerful search tools, including searching for environmental conditions. The example given by Lee allowed him to search for areas that provide the perfect growing conditions for a Pinot Noir grape.
Tools provided include: Area report; Nearest locality; Download species list or sample; Species to grid; Scatterplot; Classify; Predict; Restore prior analysis; Export area.
Users can even submit annotations for any records that they think may be incorrect.
For those interested in the Atlas, the following sites will be of interest:
http://spatial.ala.org.au is the URL for atlas itself
http://www.ala.org.au contains information on the atlas and its capabilities.
http://www.ala.org.au/support/get-started/ help on using the Atlas
http://spatial.ala.org.au/layers provides information and access to all the layers
http://biocache.ala.org.au allows you to perform a simple search of the Atlas
