Biodiversity, NCRIS, Data, Australia, Collections, Species, Network

National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy

The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS, http://www.ncris.dest.gov.au/) has provided support for the development of a number of key infrastructure capabilities to support Australian research. One of these capability areas is Integrated Biological Systems, which brings together three projects:

  • The Australian Phenomics Network (APN, http://www.australianphenomics.org.au/), a world-class network of mouse production, cryopreservation, phenotyping, documentation, distribution and databasing facilities
  • The Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF, http://www.plantphenomics.org.au/), providing state-of-the-art capabilities for plant phenotyping (controlled environments, field-based plant growth monitoring, automated imaging and computing technologies), enabling researchers to measure the attributes of plants and relate these to their genetic make-up
  • The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), providing integration and discovery services for a wide range of biodiversity and biological data, including services to support the APN and APPF

Several other NCRIS capabilities will be managing biological data and the ALA will work with these capabilities to identify synergies and to maximise sharing and reuse of services, tools and content. Linkages are expected to be particularly strong with the Networked Biosecurity Framework capability, which has plans to develop an Australian Biosecurity Information Network (ABIN), and with the planned Terrestrial Ecological Research Network (TERN) capability.

The Atlas of Living Australia is also working with the NCRIS Platforms for Collaboration capability to ensure that ALA infrastructure is compatible with that developed by other NCRIS capabilities. Platforms for Collaboration is providing the ALA with additional funding through its NeAT programme for a project entitled Data Integration and Annotation Serviecs in Biodiversity. This project will develop the ALA Metadata Repository and Data Annotation Services.