Towards a national bio-environmental data facility: experiences from the Atlas of Living Australia

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA: http://www.ala.org.au) provides the largest free and open repository of integrated biological and environmental information in a consistent format for the Australian region. As of June 2015, the ALA contained over 55 million records (10% of Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s (GBIF’s) total), consisting of 150,000+ native and alien species, nearly 500 layers of gridded and polygonal bio-environmental data, 39+ million pages of biological literature, and 45,000+ images of species and other integrated biological data. The development of the research interface to the ALA (http://spatial.ala.org.au) was the trigger to develop an architecture designed to tightly integrate environmental data for online use with biological data. Environmental layers are classed as environmental (gridded with continuous values) or contextual (polygonal with discrete class values). A suite of analysis and visualization tools have been developed to demonstrate the value of integrating the ALA’s biological and environmental data. This paper outlines the purpose and process of establishing the ALA and discusses the integration of environmental data relevant to biodiversity research in the Australian region and the vision for continually improved services for research, area management, education, and citizen science. The ALA’s environmental infrastructure addresses current needs but increased data types, volumes, and resolution suggests new directions are needed to provide quality services into the future. The experience of building the ALA has relevance for other agencies setting up similar infrastructure which supports integrated access to and use of their national biological and environmental information.

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