The ALA’s spatial portal and mapping tools have been greatly enhanced and are now available at http://spatial.ala.org.au. This has been a major re-work of the portal, simplifying the user interface and adding a lot more flexibility to the manipulation of species, areas and layers. A list of available ‘layers’ is at http://spatial.ala.org.au/layers. As well as mapping species distributions and customising the map view in the spatial portal, Atlas users can:
- incorporate a selection of over 350 map layers in species modelling and environmental classification. Layers include land-use, social and political boundaries, climate, hydrology, substrate, topography, fire and vegetation.
- download species records including values from map layers at each location.
- visualise species records in their environmental context through scatterplots based on any pair of environmental variables.
- upload their own files of species records for analysis in the spatial portal.