Atlas of Living Australia

Research Projects | Updated 1 decade ago

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The Western Australian Museum is a partner in the Atlas of Living Australia project, a collaborative, national project focused on making information about Australia’s biodiversity more accessible and useable online.

About the Atlas of Living Australia

The Atlas of Living Australia is building a better picture of Australia’s animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms for research, taxonomy, management, education and other uses.

It aims to enable anyone to locate, access and combine information on all aspects of Australian biodiversity, online.

The Atlas website already holds over 23 million records on the distribution of Australia’s fauna and flora, in addition to maps, images and literature.

Anyone using the Atlas site can create lists and maps of the species around a location, and access species pages, distribution maps, photos and other multimedia.

The Atlas site also provides access to reference lists of species’ names and classifications, databases on specimens held in natural history collections, databases of field observations, published literature, identification keys, and a wide range of other databases and web sites.

But the Atlas needs more information about all Australian species to help protect and manage Australia’s biodiversity. Members of the public can help by contributing photos and information to the Atlas site.

The end result will provide more integrated data and new tools and services; opening further possibilities for research and management.

For an overview of the Atlas, see the latest Fact Sheet [PDF, 1.1 MB]

Who is Involved in the Atlas Project?

The Atlas project is a national scientific collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australian museums, the natural history collections community and the Australian Government.

Partners in the Atlas of Living Australia are keen to share more comprehensive and accessible information on Australia’s biodiversity online, including access to biodiversity information from museums, herbaria and biological collections.

Partners in the Atlas Project

* The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
* Australian Museum
* Museums and Art Galleries of Northern Territory
* Museum Victoria
* Queensland Museum
* South Australian Museum
* Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
* Western Australian Museum
* Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD)
* Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria (CHAH)
* Council of Heads of Australian Collections of Microorganisms (CHACM)
* Council of Heads of Australian Entomological Collections (CHAEC)
* Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC)
* Southern Cross University
* The University of Adelaide
* The Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF)
* The Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (SEWPaC, formerly DEWHA).

The Atlas project works together with other related NCRIS projects, in particular the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), the Australian Biosecurity Intelligence Network (ABIN), the Australian Phenomics Network (APN) and the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF).

International Collaborations

The Atlas of Living Australia works with relevant international organisations to mobilise biodiversity data, put it to use and improve web-based tools and services.

The Atlas also collaborates with a number of international projects to incorporate more comprehensive information about Australian biodiversity, for example, Biodiversity Heritage Library and Morphbank.

The Atlas project is a participant node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and an overseas partner of the Encyclopaedia of Life (EOL), the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the European Union’s Distributed Dynamic Diversity Databases for Life (4D4Life) and the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE).

Atlas Funding

The Atlas is funded by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and further supported by the Super Science Initiative funded from the Education Investment Fund until June 2012.

For more information, please visit http://www.ala.org.au.