Dear friends of the Atlas of Living Australia
I would like to take this opportunity to extend Best Wishes for the Holiday Season and a Happy and Prosperous New Year on behalf of myself and all the Atlas staff. And, as the year draws to a close, it gives me a chance to reflect on what we have achieved through the year. 2012 has been a year of significant accomplishment for the Atlas.
- Use of the Atlas website has grown to an average usage of 2000 visitors daily.
- A 3 year Atlas-funded ABRS project added 29,864 new and previously unknown species to the Australian National Species Lists (more information here).
- The Australian Virtual Herbarium (AVH) (http://avh.ala.org.au/) and Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums (OZCAM) (http://ozcam.ala.org.au/) are fully operational portals supported within the ALA infrastructure.
- Additional portals are now available for the Australian Seedbank Partnership (http://asbp.ala.org.au/), Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) (http://obis.ala.org.au/) and Australian Microbial Resources Information Network (AMRIN) (http://amrin.ala.org.au/).
- We have grown to eighteen active Field Data Capture Production Sites, with over 20 under development.
- Two smart phone apps have been released for public use making field data capture easier and increasing science awareness to a new generation of scientists
- Oz Atlas App was released in May and is available for free via iPhones/iPads or Android devices.
- The Great Koala Count App (developed in collaboration with CSIRO IM&T) was released in November.This App was developed for the Great Koala Count held in South Australia which saw over 1000 citizen scientists record nearly 1500 koalas on the 28th of November. Data captured through the App was immediately uploaded to the Great Koala Count website.
- A Bioblitz is a collaboration of scientists, naturalists, citizen scientists and members of the public working together to discover, identify and record a snapshot of a region’s biodiversity. The Atlas supported two Bioblitzes in 2012, with more to come in 2013:
- The Bermagui Bioblitz in March in partnership with the Atlas of Life in the Coastal Wilderness.
- The Thurgoona Bioblitz in May in partnership with the Great Eastern Ranges Slopes 2 Summit Project.
- The Biodiversity Volunteer Portal continues to grow its activities, and has now had over 28,000 transcription tasks completed by volunteers – an impressive example of crowdsourcing the digitization of biodiversity information.
These are just a few of the highlights for 2012, and we will have certainly left out a number of important contributions. However, the Atlas has now made it much easier to track its achievements in a dynamic fashion through the ALA dashboard (http://dashboard.ala.org.au). A quick glimpse at the Dashboard gives some pretty impressive examples of Data Re-Use.
- The Atlas contains 35 million records – and has had a total of 562 million records downloaded for an average of over 16 downloads for every record!
- We can also see that there is a significant use of Atlas records to support a variety of scientific
research, environmental monitoring and reporting, conservation management/planning, biosecurity and education.
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| ALA Dashboard as of 17 December 2012. | |
We look forward to continuing our collaboration with you through what will be another productive year for the Atlas in 2013.
John La Salle
Director