In 2013, the Living Atlases community was established by GBIF to help countries around the world develop biodiversity infrastructure based on the ALA's open source platform. The community has just released two video tutorials explaining the features of the Living Atlases platform.

By launching two video tutorials, the Living Atlases community aims to enable end-users around the world to take full advantage of the Living Atlas infrastructure. 

The first video demonstrates the structure of a Living Atlas including how to search, refine and download biodiversity data.

The second video digs into the spatial components of the Atlas including the regions module that allows the user to find species recorded in a defined region.

Both videos are available in English with subtitles in French, Spanish and Portuguese. The videos are one key output from a project to improve documentation for the Living Atlases funded through the 2018 Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (CESP).

About the Living Atlases community

Living Atlases are based on a software platform originally developed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). The informatics infrastructure enables the aggregation of biodiversity data from multiple sources and supports integrated access and use of biological and environmental information.

Since 2013, with help from ALA and GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), community members have organised technical training sessions and presented at numerous international meetings like GEO BON (Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network) and TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards, previously known as Taxonomic Databases Working Group). As a result of these and other efforts, an increasing number of GBIF nodes and other organisations have implemented the platform; 16 Atlases are now in production around the world, with work in progress on another 13 installations.

The Living Atlases community website offers a current and complete list of participating countries along with full technical documentation and news from across the community. 

For more information, read Strengthening the Living Atlases Community of Practice  from GBIF news. 

Back to ALA newsletter – June 2019