Super Science and Future Directions
The Atlas of Living Australia was funded for 2006-2011 as part of the Australian government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. In May 2009, the project was given a significant boost through the injection of an additional $30 million under the Super Science Initiative. These new funds are for use in the period 2009-2011 to advance the development of components of the ALA.
The ALA has been consulting with partner organisations and with natural history collections around Australia to plan the use of these new funds. This plan is near completion and will be circulated shortly. It addresses six major areas of activity:
- Collection Data Management – to assist natural history collections in sharing data on the materials in their collections and the species researched by their staff
- Australian National Species Lists – to maintain and use the lists of plants, animals and microorganisms known to occur in Australia
- Geospatial Data Management – to provide well-integrated information on the occurrence of Australian species and to support mapping and analysing their distribution
- Rich Data Stores – to provide repositories to store and share biodiversity images, molecular sequences, identification keys and digital documents
- Data Integration – to connect information from different sources and to help users to find and access it
- Data Dissemination – to provide web portals to deliver information organised to meet user needs
More details will be released in the next ALA newsletter.
During 2009, the ALA has been developing several core tools which will be launched later this year. These include a search tool for specimens and observations of any Australian species, web service interfaces to access data from the Australian Faunal Directory and the Australian Plant Census, and tools for registering web sites, documents, images and other data sets of relevance to the ALA.
