The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is Australia’s national biodiversity database. It provides free, online access to information about Australia’s amazing biodiversity.
TL;DR – just take me to the API docs…https://api.ala.org.au/
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The data contained within the ALA has been fully parsed, processed and augmented with consistent taxonomic, geolocation and climate/environmental data. Our data API provides access to over 85+ million species occurrence records as well as taxonomic and scientific name information for over 200,000 species, complete with geospatial, taxonomic and temporal searching & filtering as well as bulk downloads for use “offline”.
Services ALA provides:
- Facetted search interface for species occurrence records and species & taxonomic information
- JSON web services (API docs)
- OGC mapping services (API docs)
- PNG map image files (alternative to WMS for use as static, non-interactive map, API docs)
- CSV bulk download files (API docs)
- R library (docs)
Exploring biodiversity data
ALA species and occurrence record web pages are consumers of our web services, so using our web UI is a great way to explore data and to see how to call the various web services.
- Occurrence records search interface – https://biocache.ala.org.au
- Species names & taxonomic search interface – https://bie.ala.org.au
E.g. This occurrence records page for the Dwarf Bearded Dragon:
https://biocache.ala.org.au/occurrences/search?taxa=Dwarf+Bearded+Dragon (or)
the URL can be manipulated by adding a path prefix of ‘/ws‘ to get the JSON version:
https://biocache.ala.org.au/ws/occurrences/search?taxa=Dwarf+Bearded+Dragon (or)
Examples
- Display a map of known species occurrences in Australia for the Koala (web; PNG; WMS tile)
- Download all the species occurrence records for all Eucalyptus species in NSW (web; CSV)
- Download a list of reptile species that occur in a 5km radius of the Sydney Opera house (web; JSON; CSV)
- Get a list of all bird records for the decade 1980-1989 (web; JSON)
- Find an image of a particular species, e.g. Gang-Gang Cockatoo (web; JSON)