ALA Newsletter November 2020

Since the project launch in February this year the Data Quality project team has been working with the ALA user community to identify data quality related issues and develop solutions.  Thank you to everyone who completed our surveys, contributed to our understanding of the baseline perceptions of data quality, helped to prioritise the issues, and tested solutions. 

Prioritisation survey results 

After establishing a baseline for perceptions of data quality (see results), we conducted a prioritisation survey to identify which issues the data quality project address first. The top two issues identified were: 

• Users of the ALA are using data accessed via the ALA without filtering out records that are not fit for purpose. 
• I don’t know whether to use particular records or datasets for my purpose because quality indicators are not visible, or I don’t understand what the information means. 

Data Quality project first release – improvements to data filters  

In response to the issues above, the project developed a new capability to pre-filter search results so that lower quality records (such as those with incomplete or inconsistent data) are not shown unless they are actively included. 

The filters can be seen in a new Data Profile section above the search results. 

The new release enables users to switch filters on or off and manage them as a group or individually. Information is available on the fields and data that make up the filters through mouse-over text and clickable info icons (i).   

To get involved, join beta testing of the new Data profiles feature.  

To learn more about the new data filter features, read Getting started with the Data profiles 

For more information on the data quality project please visit the Data Quality project page or contact us at dataquality@ala.org.au. 

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was developed in 2010 to support the needs of the national and international research community for timely access to Australian biodiversity data. In this time, it has grown into one of the world’s foremost biodiversity infrastructures and leads Australia’s commitment to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

The Australian biodiversity information community, partnering with the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), should be proud of our national and global achievements. One of many remarkable achievements is the international Living Atlases community. This now delivers science impact globally through 27 national atlases built on ALA-developed infrastructure, shared Australian capability and knowledge.

In this anniversary year, it’s timely to reflect on the history of the ALA. Its origins owe much to the vision, commitment and partnerships that were already in place in the museums, collections and herbaria sectors and we are proud to be part of this story. In the late 1990s, the peak body for herbaria in the region, the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria (CHAH) formed a consortium with the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) to digitise and database specimens resulting in the Australasian Virtual Herbarium (AVH).

The museum community has a similar story. The zoological collections formed the Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC) in 1992 with a national viewpoint on museum-held biodiversity data issues, an exchange of ideas and interactions with ABRS and Environmental Information Resources Network within what is now the Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment. Following the success of the AVH, CHAFC sought to improve the sharing of data through then newly evolving web technology. This resulted in the Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums, or OZCAM in 2002.

The establishment of the ALA owes its foundation to the prior existence of AVH and OZCAM and this history runs deep in the architecture of the ALA. More importantly the strength of these existing networks, partnerships and governance models provided a sound foundation for accelerating the vision under the newly formed NCRIS program in 2007.

From its origins in the collections sector, the ALA has astutely expanded its remit to broaden the portfolio of data and services it offers Australian science and decision-making. The inclusion of biodiversity data from state government agencies, major research programs and its support of the citizen sector has significantly improved our understanding of Australia’s biodiversity.

The events we’ve witnessed in 2020 provide a timely reminder of the criticality of maintaining a comprehensive, representative and adequate national biodiversity infrastructure. It is fundamental to improving our understanding of the impact of current and future bushfires and other environmental threats, on biodiversity and supporting ensuing restoration efforts. It provides fundamental data to help understand the global behaviour of zoonotic diseases and their role in future pandemics, and it can position Australia to more effectively deal with biosecurity risks that impact our environment and economy.

Reflecting on the strategic priorities for our sector –  for example around higher throughput digitisation of our collections and the rapid growth in genomics-based methods in biodiversity sciences –  we believe we are extremely well placed to grow and evolve to meet these challenges through our ongoing partnerships with the ALA.

In closing, we acknowledge the significant vision and contribution made through the Australian Government’s NCRIS program in realising the ALA vision, and the partnerships that have been so fundamental to its success. This includes the thought leaders, the data partners and ALA’s institutional supporters that can rightfully be proud of what Australia has achieved.

Cameron Slatyer
Branch Manager | Life and Geosciences
Australian Museum Research Institute, Science and Learning, Australian Museum 

Professor Darren Crayn
Director
Australian Tropical Herbarium

As an outcome from the recent Federal Budget, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) had positive news with $96 million secured for the 2022-23 financial year for current projects. $61 million was also provided for four new national research capabilities including Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) and Indigenous eResearch data tools and platforms. This is a positive signal regarding the importance of the NCRIS program as a core capability supporting Australia’s research sector.

As Australia’s national biodiversity data infrastructure and one of the world’s foremost such capabilities, we rely on the strength of our partnerships with data providers, users and stakeholders. Indeed, the genesis of the ALA was built on the strength and richness of existing relationships within the museums, collections and herbaria communities.

Australia’s fruitful partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) also provides our community a unique opportunity to ensure that local, regional or national biodiversity data delivers impact globally. The ALA is particularly proud of the relationship we play hosting the Australian node of GBIF.

Supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), and hosted by CSIRO, the ALA website launched 10 years ago. Since those beginnings the ALA has matured from an energetic ‘start-up’ to a stable and reliable data infrastructure delivering world-trusted biodiversity data and related services.

Our strategy builds on this history while identifying where we need to evolve. This includes adapting our infrastructure to deal with an increase in volume and variety of data, improving how we deal with data quality in a federated system, delivering more comprehensive and representative national data holdings, and partnering with new sectors.

We welcome further conversations with our partners to identify possible alignment opportunities framed around our strategy.

Please contact us at support@ala.org.au if you would like more information or if you have any questions.

We lead off this issue with the release of the ALA Strategy 2020-2025 which has been developed in response to the findings from our 2019 ALA Future Directions national consultation process. Our communities’ feedback regarding what’s worked well and where the ALA needs to head to continue to remain relevant was instrumental in shaping the strategy and we are grateful for those contributions. Our strategy has also been informed by what our team understands needs to evolve to future-proof the ALA, for example with regard to the anticipated increase in the variety and volume of data we receive annually from our partners.

In response to our strategy we’ve already commenced both an architectural upgrade to our infrastructure, and the ALA data quality project both of which are described in further detail on our projects pages. These projects go to the core of our first two strategic objectives around delivering trusted data and provision of robust services. In addition to steering the ALA’s work program we see the strategy as an opportunity for our partners to identify points of engagement or alignment, and in coming months we’ll provide you greater clarity around our project roadmap.

In response to the summer bushfire crisis, ALA on behalf of CSIRO led a national coordination process bringing together the citizen science and research sectors to explore how best to support ongoing response and preparedness activities.  This activity resulted in the publication of a recommendations report which explores how to establish a national approach for ongoing citizen science and traditional science engagement. CSIRO have now appointed a program lead to further progress this work. Erin Roger, based with the ALA, will design and lead a program of work to engender greater coordination between both sectors with the aim of  better supporting current recovery, and future preparedness activities as we approach the coming summer. We are pleased to be working so closely with CSIRO’s bushfire and recovery program.

And finally, in this issue we showcase three contemporary Australian research publications that leverage the capability of the ALA to further our understanding of climate impacts on eucalypts and coral, the long-term shifts in the distribution of plant species that provide critical habitat for Koalas, and evaluating low-cost techniques for monitoring pollinators in open and wooded habitats. For our data partners and our team its always rewarding to see how our collective efforts enable such important science.

We hope you enjoy the winter edition of our newsletter.

Kind regards,

Andre Zerger

Spatial information in the ALA

Spatial information is a big part of what we do at the ALA. To enable thorough spatial analysis for our users, we sample each and every occurrence record from our data providers against several hundred spatial layers. This means that when you’re searching for species in the ALA, you can search by a particular area (for example, by the state of Victoria, or by a national park – we call these contextual spatial layers) or by a particular environmental condition, like climate, or vegetative cover. All layers can be visualised through our Spatial Portal, and some of them through our regions tool (http://regions.ala.org.au/).

Time for an update

To ensure we continue to provide a national representative collection of environmental and contextual layers for analysis, we will be undertaking a review, update and consolidation of spatial layers that are provided within ALA services. This review will take into consideration:

How often layers are used

We’ve found that many layers are not used very often at all in the Spatial Portal. Our stats tell us there’s a long-tail distribution of usage whereby 80% of layers are used less than 5% of the layer of maximum usage, and 40% are used less than 1% of the layer of maximum usage.

Our system performance

Supporting and maintaining digital infrastructure to index and query hundreds of layers is particularly challenging and impose significant resource constraints.

Whether layers are still current and relevant

Some layers or suites of layers have been superseded, upgraded or are highly correlated with other layers.

Whether layers are available elsewhere

We needed to examine the ALA’s position in light of other related portals, such as the Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL). The BCCVL is better suited to provide the multitude of climate model projections, and IMOS’ Australian Ocean Data Network portal (AODN, IMOS) is better suited to provide oceanographic layers.

Our challenge is to provide a good representative sample of both environmental and contextual layers relevant to biodiversity data analysis, but we want to avoid being overly specialised.

What’s next?

Over the coming months we’ll be working on updating and rationalising our layer holdings. This review will be repeated annually.

More information

More comprehensive information and technical detail about this process is provided in our Knowledge Base article ALA Environmental and Contextual Spatial Layers, including our criteria for review.

As usual, if you have any questions or comments, please let us know at support@ala.org.au.

The start of 2020 has brought many challenges for our nation as we continue to respond to and recover from the bushfire crisis. For the ALA, it’s meant a very different January to the one we expected however we’re proud to have been able to support communities, government and the research sector.

Our team has been working closely with our colleagues in CSIRO, the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA), universities, museums and collections to respond to the outcomes from the bushfire science roundtable convened by the Hon Karen Andrews MP, Minister for Industry, Science and Technology in mid-January.

The ALA is leading a process to identify opportunities for members of the public to engage in citizen science projects and to maximise the likelihood of these activities delivering science-ready data.

Despite the tragic impacts on people, and the natural and built environment, the fires also provide an opportunity to learn, evaluate and improve how we work across sectors. Ultimately, this work will lead to a better understanding of the impact of bushfire, and the ability to design response and recovery programs using the best available national data.

I’d also like to alert you to the recently released ALA Future Directions National Consultation Findings Report which is the culmination of an extensive stakeholder consultation process conducted in late 2019.

We consulted with individuals and groups representing research, government, education and community sectors. The process considered what’s been achieved nationally through the formation of the ALA and provided guidance on where the ALA should focus to maintain its relevance through the eyes of our stakeholders. Joanne Daly’s report is digestible, informative and offers lessons beyond the ALA. I encourage you to download a copy and have a read.

In response to these findings, our team has worked closely with the ALA Advisory Board and our stakeholders to develop a new 5-year strategy. This is scheduled for release in May-June 2020, with implementation to commence in July 2020. You’ll learn about this in an upcoming newsletter.

Kind regards,

Andre Zerger

Back to ALA Newsletter February 2020

The DigiVol platform developed by the Australian Museum in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia, is a world-leading collections digitisation platform that invites volunteers to log on to a computer and help digitise and transcribe museum and library images and specimens. There are currently 4000 active DigiVol volunteers in Australia, transcribing for 58 museum and library institutions in Australia and internationally.

Recent upgrades to the DigiVol platform improved the processing functions to enable faster upload, throughput and rules for self-validation of camera trap images. Camera traps are used in many different research projects to monitor the presence of animals in isolated locations and nocturnal animals.

You can use DigiVol’s Wildlife Spotter to help identify species caught by hidden cameras for a variety of research projects across Australia.

• Saving our Species (SoS) Malleefowl project run by the NSW Government’s Office of the Environment and Heritage
• Taronga Sanctuary Project run by Taronga Western Plains Zoo
• Bush Heritage Wallaby Project run by Bush Heritage Australia
• Superb Parrots in the ACT run by ACT Parks and Conservation Service

“The recent upgrades have resulted in a marked increase in data being captured through the DigiVol camera trap projects. Between August and October there was a 500% increase in the number of tasks completed on DigiVol, with over 180,000 completed in October, mostly as a result of camera trap identifications,” said Paul Flemons, the Manager of Digital Collections and Citizen Science at the Australian Museum who manages the DigiVol project.

“We are quickly coming up to 5000 users and have just passed 1.5 million tasks completed, and will go close to 2 million before the end of the year.”

To help transcribe and digitise records, register with DigiVol and join an expedition.

Back to Atlas of Living Australia newsletter October 2019