To celebrate National Science Week 2023, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) hosted three free virtual events. Our events aimed to ignite curiosity, foster learning, and deepen connection with biological sciences and the environment.
Whether you were able to join us on the day and want to catch-up on the content, or if you weren’t able to make it, we’ve got you covered with recordings of our three events.
15th August 2023 – {galah} 101 Beginners guide
Check out the slides from Dr Dax Kellie and Dr Amanda Buyan here
Are you interested in getting the most out of data in the ALA? We’ve developed the ALA {galah} tool to enable users to deep-dive and transform species occurrence information. Whether you want to locate and download species records, investigate taxonomic information and associated media such as images or sounds, or restrict queries to certain taxa or locations, {galah} can do it all! This tool has been developed for both the R-Studio and Python coding languages.
Our beginner-friendly workshop introduces a step-by-step introduction to using both {galah} for R-Studio and Python
16th August 2023 – All is F.A.I.R. in open science and data
Open science is the practice of making scientific knowledge, research and information accessible. As Australia’s national biodiversity data aggregator, we explore why open science is so important to delivering strong biodiversity outcomes.
Hear ALA team members Ely Wallis, Peggy Newman and Dax Kellie discuss:
- How the F.A.I.R. (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles are used through copyright and licencing in the ALA
- How the ALA supports open science through its data infrastructure and services
- How open science facilitates transparent, robust research.
17th August 2023 – Maximising your metadata for citizen science
Citizen science is an accessible gateway for anybody to engage in science regardless of age, location or demographic. Integrated citizen science apps take in millions of species occurrence records each year, which are then verified before being fed through to the ALA to become open and accessible data.
Hear from Dr Erin Roger and Cam Slatyer from the ALA, Thomas Mesaglio from iNaturalist and Dr Jasmin Packer from the FungiMap Project discuss what makes a great species observation record, and learn tips and tricks for collecting the best quality metadata – data about data. Higher quality metadata (attributes like location, images, date of collection, etc.) helps to paint a more detailed picture of Australia’s biodiversity. More accurate metadata also helps to identify native vs. invasive species more readily for better biosecurity monitoring.