As part of this review we spoke to a number of people who use the ALA on a regular basis and benchmarked our site against best practice. This review told us that while many of our users think the ALA provides some very useful resources, at times the site can be difficult to navigate, sometimes is unstable, and that there is not enough support material.

We are pleased to be able to release this new and improved website as a first step to addressing some of these issues.

Here’s a brief summary of what we have changed as part of this website refresh.

• We’ve improved how our content is grouped to make it easier for you to navigate the website. See footer navigation example below.

  

• We’ve provided some extra content to help you get more concise information about the ALA, what we do, and how you can use the ALA. See ALA knowledge base example below.

  

• We’ve redesigned our pages with a more up-to-date visual design.
• We’ve made our basic user support materials easier to find. We recognise that we still need to do better in this area and will be working towards further improvements in this space. You can access our user guides here.
• We’ve made it easier for you to sign up, and sign in, by making this more prominent on the homepage.
• We’ve made it easier for you to get in contact with us by providing you with an easy to find contact form and clearer call to actions on pages. See contact form example below.

  

This is just the first step to developing an even better ALA website and incremental and continuous improvements will be made over the coming months. Our goal is to reduce the pain associated with large releases, to gain faster feedback from you, our users, and to offer incremental and continuous increases in the value of the ALA.

We would value and appreciate your feedback on this website refresh. You can provide feedback and ask questions to the team at info@ala.org.au.

The ALA is home to millions of records about Australia’s amazing biodiversity, enabling us to have more detailed picture of Australia’s biodiversity than ever before.  These records come from many places- museums, herbaria, universities, and government departments just to name a few.  In addition to this, we also rely on community sightings.  Sometimes you may have spotted something unique in your area, but before posting it to the ALA, you want to be sure what it is.  To help you with this, we’ve put together some tips on how to go about identifying a species.

Top tip #1

Visit our Species identification information page.  Here you will find links to a number of resources that may be able to help you with identifying unknown Australian species.  iNaturalist for example, allows you to share your sightings and get help with identifying it.  The ALA is not able to help directly with species identification but we’re more than happy to point you in the direction of the organisations who can help.

Top tip #2

Check out what has already been sighted in that area.  Did you know that you can use the ALA to map the occurrence records at a particular location? That way you can see which species have already been sighted in the area and possibly match the species you have seen to one of them.  This is a good place to start your search and it will also give you a bit of insight into your local biodiversity.

Simply go to Explore locations from the ALA home page, then Explore by location.

Then type in your suburb or postcode or street name. You can change the radius of the range and move the pin. You can filter the results by clicking on the group.

A more detailed description of this process can be found in the ALA User Guides.

If you found this helpful, keep your eye out on our blog for more tips on how to get the most out of the ALA, and your frequently asked questions answered.

Previously, when new visitors to the Atlas of Living Australia website were asked to create a new login to access our tools or ‘report a sighting’, some might have been quick to click the red cross in the corner and mumble “ergh, never mind” when asked to fill in another long details form.

Great news! It is now much easier for new and existing members to interact with our website: users can now create a login using a Twitter, Facebook, or Google account. Existing Atlas of Living Australia members will also be able to link their ALA account to a preferred social media account (with the same registered email address) for a quicker and easier logon experience.

This added option is all part of our current mission to revitalise the Atlas of Living Australia website in 2015 and encourage new users to get involved with the Atlas.

If you are having trouble with your ALA login, please email support@ala.org.au

This week the Atlas released a redesigned version of our Report a Sighting page, which allows users to report on sightings of species and upload their images to the Atlas. The map functionality has been simplified and we’ve added a new tool called “location-based species suggestion tool” which provides thumbnail images of species that are known to occur in the user’s location. The page has also been optimised for use on mobile phones and tablets.

The Atlas has some exciting new identification tools in development that are soon to be released. We are also working on the capability to join the Atlas through your existing Social Media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the ALA website upgrades, please send to support@ala.org.au

The Atlas of Living Australia website has been operating since 2010 and provides free, online access to a vast repository of information about Australia’s biodiversity. It supports research, environmental monitoring, conservation planning, biosecurity activities, education, citizen science, and the digitisation of millions of existing physical records around the country. The Atlas has over 54 million records on approximately 110,566 Australian species (as at May 2015 and growing rapidly), these records can be investigated through individual species profiles containing photos and collections data, and by using the mapping and analysis tools developed by the Atlas.

The Atlas of Living Australia would like to discover more about how the Atlas assists users to gain further information on Australian species and how the Atlas can improve for the future. An online survey has been developed to gain further insight into how you use the Atlas and an opportunity for you to provide the Atlas with some important feedback. No matter how much or how little you use the Atlas of Living Australia, we would like to hear from you – as an added incentive, you could win a fantastic Atlas of Living Australia prize pack, including your very own cap, t-shirt, and coffee mug!

The information gathered from this survey will be critical to ensuring we can provide the highest level of information and tools to support our users, national research, our partners, and the future of Australia’s biodiversity.

To complete the survey click here. The survey will close on June 1st 2015.

The Atlas receives support from the Australian Government through the National Research Infrastructure for Australia (NCRIS).

I like good wine. Fortunately these days, Australia has a huge number of excellent value wines. After many years enjoying Australia’s wonderful Shiraz, I’ve transitioned through Cabernets to Pinot Noir. However, finding good Pinot Noir is a lot harder than finding good Shiraz.

So that brings me to the point of this article. Maybe you want to discover wineries that are likely to produce a good wine? Maybe you want to grow your own? If the latter, note what a wine grower friend of mine once said: Wine is 33% grapes, 33% winemaking and 33% marketing. The remaining 1% is probably luck.

Can the Atlas of Living Australia be used to find locations of environmental conditions suitable for a specific species? As you have probably guessed, the answer is “Yes!” We can’t help you with winemaking or marketing, but we can (among many other things) help identify areas that could/should produce wine (or anything) that you may like.

The Basics

The Atlas of Living Australia has two basic types of information about Australia’s living things: Species and Environments. As of November 2012, we have over 35 million occurence records about the location of species. People over centuries have recorded what species they observed or collected, and the Atlas has worked hard over the past five years to try and get as much of this data together online in one place. This task continues.

We have a lot of information about species, but one of the most important is “Where do they occur?” The Atlas has also integrated nearly 400 environmental layers. These layers have been collected and integrated into our Spatial Portal because we believe that they are likely to have some relationship with species. We know that the location of species is controlled at least in part by some of the environmental characteristics of these layers.

For example, we know that trees will not grow above the ‘tree line’: the altitude where it gets too cold for them to grow let alone reproduce. We also know that plants and animals require water: not too much and not too little. So each species occurs in an envelope of environmental characteristics.Each environmental layer is a map linking location and environment.

If we know the location, we can identify its environment. The opposite is also possible with the Atlas: If we know the environment, we can find the location/s where this environment occurs.

That’s the key to this exercise: If we know WHERE (good) Pinot Noir (or anything else!) is produced, then we can find out what environment it prefers, and the locations of these environments.

Find the Target Areas

The first step in this study is to locate one or more wineries that you think do it best. In this case, I have selected a few locations in the Yarra Valley because it is the area that produces my favourite style of Pinot Noir.

I’ve also used random coordinates within the area to avoid identifying any particular wineries, but these locations are typical of good Pinot territory. The easiest way to find the location of the wineries is to use either the Spatial Portal or Google Maps.  Use the web to find the address and then find the latitude and longitude (in decimal degrees). Repeat for each winery that produces what you like.The next step is to enter those coordinates into Excel or the equivalent and save the file as a type CSV (comma separated variables).

The first column should contain the name of the first winery. The second column contains the longitude in decimal degrees while the third column is the latitude of that winery in decimal degrees. You can add as many wineries as you like, but remember that they should all have one thing in common – that they grow the best of their type as far as you are concerned.

Below is an example of what the contents of that file may look like.

Import the Target Locations and Export the Environmental Data
(in one step)

The next step is to import the CSV file into the Spatial Portal of the Atlas of Living Australia and find out what the environment is at these locations. Select Export | Point sample. This will initiate a dialogue to import our points and then append their environments.

The Spatial Portal’s point sampling option

The first question in the process is “What area?” Use “Current extent” which should be Australia by default. The next step is usually to select one or more species and to have the locations of those species used as the sample. For this exercise however, we will use the locations of our wineries as a substitute for species locations. In the Spatial Portal, you can import the location and a bunch of associated features of any type of point observation, species or otherwise. For example, in the Case Study on Wind Farms, we imported the location of the wind farms as if they were species locations (which in a sense they are). Select the option Import points, and then at the next step, enter the name of the points, let’s call it Wineries. The description is optional.

We could have used another Spatial Portal Option to separately import the points and plot them (Import | Points), and then export the points with the environmental data attached (Export | Point sample – as we are doing now). We will cut corners by doing the import and export in one go.

Select the Environmental Factors

We next come to the hard part – figuring out which of of the hundreds of environmental layers in the Atlas would be relevant to defining the environment that characterizes the best growing area for Pinot Noir grapes.

One surprising outcome of research examining the hundreds of environmental layers is that a small number of relatively independent layers seem capable of defining Australian environments. One reason for that is that most of the environmental layers are related: One layer can usually substitute for many similar layers. While that is a topic for another Case Study, suffice to say that it appears that five well-chosen environmental layers seem to be able to define the environment of most areas of Australia (see Williams et al. 2012). Note: We know less about the marine environment and consequently have fewer marine than terrestrial layers.

For simplicity, we will use a predefined suite of five relatively independent layers that appear to cover Australian land environments: Use “Best 5 Williams 1960 centered climate layers.” Ideally, the species of interest should be researched to identify the environmental factors that it prefers. As well as temperature and rainfall, we would expect soil conditions, slope and aspect to be significant when it comes to grapes (terroir).

When the process is complete, we will have a file called Wineries.csv. When we examine the exported file, we can see that the Spatial Portal has appended values of the five layers to the right-hand side of the table.

ID	Longitude	Latitude	Evaporation – month min	Precipitation – driest month	Precipitation – equinox   seasonality ratio	Precipitation – spring or   autumn season	Water stress index – month   max
Winery 1	145.64	-37.80	32.01	67.00	1.30	0.30	81
Winery 2	145.56	-37.79	31.83	66.00	1.26	0.26	81
Winery 3	145.59	-37.77	31.77	66.40	1.28	0.28	81

There is very little difference in environmental values of the five layers between the three different (fictitious) winery sites. This is not surprising as I selected three random locations in the Yarra Valley of Victoria and therefore one would not expect much environmental difference based on these characteristics.

Generate the Envelope

The next step uses these values in the Spatial Portal to find out where geographically these environmental conditions may also occur in Australia. We will use a feature of the Spatial Portal for defining areas called an Environmental Envelope, as noted above. This envelope defines the environment of our preferred Pinot Noir wine based on my sample points in this case.

We need to define the upper and lower limits of the environmental values. For this study, let’s use the following values

• Evaporation – month min (31-33)
• Precipitation – driest month (66-68)
• Precipitation – equinox seasonality ratio (1.2-1.4)
• Precipitation – spring or autumn season (for this exercise, let’s skip it)
• Water stress index – monthly  max (all the same so let’s skip this environmental factor as well)

These values provide a slightly broader envelope to allow for measurement errors and environmental variation. In the Spatial Portal, go to Add to Map | Areas and then select Define environmental envelope. Enter Evaporation – month min in the search box and then enter the lower and upper bound values for this layer (31.5 and 32.5) and then press the button Update species count. The map will be redrawn to display those environments and you will get a species count, in my case of 14,870. What the Spatial Portal is saying is that there are 14,870 species within those environmental ranges in Australia.

Add the remaining two layers, each time entering the ranges and pressing Update species count. When done, we have 994 species. Note this this number will be dynamic, reflecting additions to the Atlas over time. Changing the envelope by even small values will usually result in quite different counts of the number of species.

When the count has been updated, we have the definition of the environmental envelope. Press Next and the area that encompasses those environmental conditions will be mapped. To see the areas more clearly, increase the opacity of the area layer (top left on the window, slide the slider bar far right) and then select the Map options layer and select Minimal to use the Open Street Maps base map.This base map is simpler and will better display the target areas.

It is not surprising that you can see a number of areas in the Yarra Valley identified. You will however also see a number of areas near Nurran in eastern Victoria that look promising and an even smaller set of areas near Rawson mid-way between the Yarra Velly and Nurran. That’s interesting.

Summary

If you can identify the locations where your target species like to be, it is then easy to use the Spatial Portal of the Atlas of Living Australia to identify all areas within the Australian region where those environmental conditions occur. You may get some surprises.

Reference

Kristen J. Williams, Lee Belbin, Michael P. Austin, Janet L. Stein & Simon Ferrier (2012): Which environmental variables should I use in my biodiversity model? International Journal of Geographical Information Science, DOI:10.1080/13658816.2012.698015

About the Author

Lee Belbin led the team in the development of the Atlas Spatial Portal, and is now Scientific Advisor to the Atlas of Living Australia. Lee started working life as an exploration geologist in Australia and Canada in 1970. In 1972, he spent 6 years in research and teaching analytical geology at the Australian National University.  From 1979 to 1995 Lee’s research moved to quantitative ecology at CSIRO, with the last three years focused on project management.  From 1995 to 2005, he established and managed one of the world’s first multidisciplinary science data centres at the Australian Antarctic Division. During this time he developed national and international policies and methods for information management and state of the environment reporting. For the past 6 years, his company (Blatant Fabrications Pty Ltd) has focused on managing national and internal projects related to sharing scientific information. Lee has published more than 100 papers on geology, ecology, information management and policy.

At coffee with a friend recently we chatted about our latest smartphone app discovery while tweeting about the conversation, and sharing the link via Facebook. It occurred to me that I do a lot more with my phone these days than makes calls and send texts. Thanks to these nifty little tools we can identify and purchase the song playing in the café, edit the photo we just took, find out exactly what time our bus will arrive, and practically anything else in between.

With worldwide smartphone sales estimated to reach 686 million by the end of 2012, it seems that many people are embracing the new technology. As the technological capability progresses so too does the functionality and variety of apps that they support. And science is getting on board.

A smartphone app released this week is turning citizens into scientists. Citizen science is becoming an increasingly popular phenomenon and with the technology so easily accessible, why not? All you need is a smartphone, a keen eye, and a case of the curiosities.

The app has been developed by CSIRO and the Atlas of Living Australia to support South Australia’s Great Koala Count, which will take place on Wednesday, 28th November. The day will see South Australians don their citizen science hats and go forth to collect a count of Australia’s most loveable marsupial – the koala.  The project will utilise the manpower of society and smartphone technology to help scientists understand a bit more about our favourite Australian mascot.

Research scientist, Dr Andrew Baker, has been involved in developing the app and believes that it is a really exciting new way of doing science. “To ensure reliable results and accurate conclusions, we need a sufficient amount of data for our research,” he said.

“The more data we have, the more reliable our results. But scientists, of course, can’t be everywhere at once. By using apps like this, we can get around this problem as it means that we’ve got lots of people on the ground taking verifiable observations at lots of locations in a short period of time.”

And the app makes taking these observations a breeze. Snap a photo, record your observations, the phone’s inbuilt GPS records your specific location and, hey presto, you’ve got your first data point. The team even made a video to demonstrate the app in action, check out the video link – How to use smart phone app.

The applications for this technology and software development are endless, and the practicality of using phones as portable data recorders points to a strong future in this field. They remove the need to transfer recordings from notebooks to computers, which is time-consuming and increases the risk of error. They provide verifiable data through photos and GPS recordings. And perhaps best of all, they allow everyone from kindergarten kids to retired professors of ecology to get involved in scientific research about the natural world around us.

If you’d like to get involved head to www.abc.net.au/adelaide/operation/

The Great Koala Count is a joint initiative of the Barbara Hardy Institute of the University of South Australia, ABC Local Radio SA, the SA Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources, the Adelaide and Mt Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board, CSIRO and the Atlas of Living Australia.

Condamine Alliance is working with the Atlas of Living Australia to create a simple and fun smart phone app that people can use when they spot the weeds Chilean Needlegrass and Parthenium.

The app will allow users to spot, snap and send a record of their sightings to a central database, taking the fight against weeds to a new level and helping identify weed infestations.

“Working with Atlas of Living Australia has saved us significant time and money because we haven’t had to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the systems and technology,” Condamine Alliance Manager-Science Lucy Richardson said.

Want to achieve something similar? The Atlas of Living Australia’s mobile apps and website with over 34 million species occurrence records are available to NRMs and NGOs around the country.

Interested in trialling the new app? Members of the Condamine Alliance Weed Spotters Network, coordinated by the Toowoomba Landcare Group, will trial the app over the next two months before its released in Queensland next year. Please contact Toowoomba Landcare project officer Marien Stark on 0448 474 568.

 Whether your focus is frogs or ferns, the Atlas of Living Australia is a fantastic teaching resource. Built to be Australia’s primary resource of information about its plants, animals and fungi, the Atlas answers questions about different species, the environments they live in and where they occur.

Perhaps the most interesting way for students to use the Atlas is to type in their school’s address or field trip location and discover what species exist within a kilometre radius. Students can generate information to help them explore the local area, including:

• a checklist of all species in the are
• a satellite or street map with all of the different species sightings that scientists, students and members of the public have uploaded to the Atlas
• a field guide with the names and images of all species located in the area, in pdf format.

Students can also contribute to the species records in the Atlas by uploading their own species observations, either online or from the field using a free mobile app.

Older students can use the Atlas in more sophisticated ways, such as exploring the relationship between a species and its environment, generating a predictive model for a species or discovering how well biodiversity is represented in a reserve.

To learn how to use the Atlas for teaching purposes, please download this tutorial by Lee Belbin: here.

This blog will focus on point data you would like to use within the Atlas. The sandbox handles species occurrence data but can also be used to upload a list coordinates (latitude, longitude) with any number of ad-hoc properties associated with these data. Scientific names or common names are optional.

As an example, heres a dataset that we’ve uploaded for termite mounds recorded by Peter Neville on Black Mountain, ACT. This dataset includes 17 additional properties that are not in standard use within the Atlas. The sandbox will support the facetting with all 17 of these properties, and in addition intersect the coordinates with environmental and contextual layers (IBRA regions, states, local government areas). The raw data can be found here.

Once the data is uploaded, you can manipulate the data using search facets, and colour point data using custom facets:

View charts for your data, with breakdowns by the custom fields in your dataset:

And also make use of these facets in the spatial portal.

Within the spatial portal, the custom facets can be used to generate layers from subsets of the data in the same way it can with the standard facets (e.g. occurrence date, scientific name, LGA, states) for species occurrence data.

How to use it with your data

1. Visit http://sandbox.ala.org.au, and paste in your data into the text field at the top of this page..

2. Check how the sandbox has parsed your data. The sandbox will try to work out if the first line of the data are column headings or data. If it gets it wrong, you can change the interpretation of the first line of your data using the select box.

Fields headings with a yellow background are fields not recognised as standard Atlas fields. Facets will be created for these non-standard fields provided the data within these fields is below 50 characters in length. You can adjust these headings at this stage and hit the Reprocess sample button.

3.  Upload the data. Uploading and processing of your data may take up to 2 minutes. During this processing, the sandbox does the following:

• Attempts to match the classification in the records to the National Species Lists.
• Reverse geocodes points to states, IBRA, IMCRA regions
• Sensitive data checks
• Data quality checks

Once this has finished, you should see the following options:

Here are the options from here:

• “Mapping & Analysis with your data” will take you to the Spatial portal.
• “Tables & Charts of your data” will give you a tabulated view of your data, and charts you can use to subset the data.
• “Download the processed version of your data” will give you a ZIP download of the data with interpreted values.

Feedback & suggestions

Feedback and suggestions for further functionality for the sandbox are welcome.