The Murray–Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) and Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) have collaborated to develop a new data hub, which is now live and available to the public.
The MDBA collects large amounts of environment data in their role managing the water resources of the Murray–Darling Basin. They have hundreds of thousands of occurrence records for fish, aquatic insects, waterbirds and freshwater algae collected as far back as 1976. This offers a comprehensive picture of how species are distributed across the Murray–Darling Basin.
The new ALA data hub provides the MDBA with robust infrastructure to manage biodiversity data storage, visualisation and collection. It makes analysis and reporting faster and easier, and makes the data publicly accessible, so people can explore which species have been found in a particular region.
“ALA is the largest aggregator of biodiversity information in Australia, and they have the expertise in data management to help us make the most of our data,” said MDBA Project Manager Dr Katrina Phillips.
“The ALA hub also lets us view and analyse our data based on our unique spatial planning regions. For example, we can choose to view data for a specific wetland or for a water resource planning area.”
MDBA’s biodiversity data is now freely accessible through the hub interface, in accordance with the Australian Government’s open data policy. The data is also integrated into the larger repository of ALA data. The benefits of this are twofold. Firstly, MDBA staff can now search ALA data in their catchment area, in addition to MDBA data. Secondly, ALA users can now search data collected by MDBA within the larger pool of ALA data, further enriching the information available.
“We’re really happy to have our data available in this format, it makes our work a lot easier and means we can share this important data with other interested audiences,’ said Dr Phillips.
For more details, visit the MDBA Hub.
If you are interested in establishing an ALA hub for your organisation, please contact our Data Management Team.
