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The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is Australia’s national biodiversity database, delivering data and related services to more than 80,000 Australian and international users annually. Established under the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy to provide trusted biodiversity data to support the research sector, its utility now extends to government, higher education, non-government organisations and community groups. These partners provide data to the ALA and leverage its data and related services. The ALA has also played an important leadership role internationally in the biodiversity informatics and infrastructure space, both through its partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and through support for the international Living Atlases programmes which has now delivered 24 instances of ALA software to deliver sovereign biodiversity data capability around the world. This paper begins with a historical overview of the genesis of the ALA from the collections, museums and herbaria community in Australia. It details the biodiversity and related data and services delivered to users with a primary focus on species occurrence records which represent the ALA's primary data type. Finally, the paper explores the ALA's future directions by referencing results from a recently completed national consultation process.

Whether community created and driven, or developed and run by researchers, most citizen science projects operate on minimalistic budgets, their capacity to invest in fully featured bespoke software and databases is usually very limited. Further, the increasing number of applications and citizen science options available for public participation creates a confusing situation to navigate. Cloud-based platforms such as BioCollect, iNaturalist, eBird, CitSci.org, and Zooniverse, provide an opportunity for citizen science projects to leverage highly featured functional software capabilities at a fraction of the cost of developing their own, as well as a common channel through which the public can find and access projects. These platforms are also excellent vehicles to facilitate the implementation of data and metadata standards, which streamline interoperability and data sharing. Such services can also embed measures in their design, which uplift the descriptions and quality of data outputs, significantly amplifying their usability and value. In this presentation I outline the experiences of the Atlas of Living Australia on these issues and demonstrate how we are tackling them with the BioCollect and iNaturalist platforms. We also consider the differences and similarities of these two platforms with respect to standards and data structures in relation to suitability for different use cases. You are invited to join a discussion on approaches being adopted and offer insights for improved outcomes.

The label transcription and imaging of specimens in key African herbaria has been ongoing since the early 2000s. Many collections in Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea Conakry, and Togo are now fully transcribed and partially digitized. More than 200 000 transcribed specimens are available with the following distribution: Benin: 45 000 Cameroon: 70 000 Côte d’Ivoire: 18 000 Gabon: 70 000 Guinea Conakry: 5 000 Togo: 15 000 Benin: 45 000 Cameroon: 70 000 Côte d’Ivoire: 18 000 Gabon: 70 000 Guinea Conakry: 5 000 Togo: 15 000 In April 2021, a BID project was started to deliver a regional data platform of West and Central African herbaria. Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) is a multi-year programme funded by the European Union and led by GBIF with the aim of enhancing capacity for effective mobilization and use of biodiversity data in research and policy in the 'ACP' nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Our project's funding runs from April 2021 to April 2023. At this stage of the project, we are working on defining the information technology (IT) architecture (Fig. 1) and selecting the tools that we will be using to achieve our goals. In the talk, we will present our conclusions through architecture schemas and tools demonstrations. Each of the 6 countries will have its own PostgreSQL database, storing its data. They will also have access to the RIHA data management platform (Réseau Informatique des Herbiers d'Afrique / Digital Network of African Herbaria). This is a web application, developed in PHP, allowing full management of the data by herbarium administrators (Fig. 2). An Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) will fetch these herbaria data from the databases, create the Darwin Core archives, and connect these data automatically to gbif.org on a periodic basis (Fig. 3). On the databases, we will use a PostgreSQL view to ease conversion from the RIHA data model to the Darwin Core model. On the IPT, we will create one dataset per country, linked to each PostgreSQL view. The SQL query will be configured to only fetch validated data, depending on the herbarium administrator's validation in the RIHA platform. The automatic and periodic data transmission to gbif.org is a feature available in the IPT, and recently improved by the GBIF France team, which contributes to the IPT development. Another part of the automatic data workflow will be to feed a Living Atlases portal for the West and Central African herbaria. This web application will allow public users to search, display and download herbaria data from West and Central Africa (Fig. 4). Internally, this Living Atlases application will reuse open source modules developed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). The application is mainly written in Java, uses JQuery/Bootstrap for the interface and relies on SolR and Spark in the backend. It has been developed to be easily reusable, by only modifying configuration and doing web customization (HTML / CSS), hiding most of the backend technological complexity. The automatic data workflow will transfer datasets generated by the IPT, in Darwin Core Archive format, to the Living Atlases portal backend. A technical task orchestrator, yet to be selected, will implement this feature. Living Atlases subportals, limited to data of one participating country, could be easily set up, leveraging the existing backend resources (Fig. 5). One of the benefits of the Living Atlases portal is that we can easily deploy additional front end applications with limited data, configured by a filter (here, a filter on the data owner country). Only configuration and web customization (HTML / CSS) are required. All the backend modules, especially the ones storing data, are shared by the multiple front-ends, limiting the hardware consumption and data administration. The full automation of the workflow will allow this platform to run at a very low maintenance cost for IT administrators. Moreover, adding a new herbarium member from West and Central Africa will be quite easy thanks to the architecture of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit and Living Atlases tools (Fig. 6).

Taxonomic name validation and elucidation in biodiversity collection datasets (specimens and names) at institutions are well established, as is the enabling of historical scientific literature, thanks to the work at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Plazi TreamentBank, and others. However, a significant area yet to be enhanced in this way is in the assembly of environmental impact survey (EIS) assessments across states or countries. In this project, we looked at using new tools such as AWS Textract to extract text from a range of document types, together with the newly-released gnfinder tool to find taxon names in submitted EIS documents, match them in the Global Names Index and other sources, then use this unique names list to interrogate the Atlas of Living Australia to find additional applicable data, such as the taxonomic and conservation status of given names. The result is a consolidated report summarising the validity and status of taxon names in each EIS report, saving many hours of manual lookup across multiple datasets and thereby significantly streamlining the process of evaluating each environmental proposal.

The Atlas of Living Costa Rica (www.crbio.cr) is a biodiversity data portal based on the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and managed by the Biodiversity Informatics Research Center (CRBio) and the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBio). It currently shares nearly eight million occurrence records and more than 5000 species pages about Costa Rican vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs, nematodes, plants, and fungi. These pages contain information elements pertaining to, for instance, morphological descriptions, distribution, habitat, conservation status, management, nomenclature, and multimedia (Vargas et al. 2018). In order to fully integrate species pages into the ALA architecture, CRBio is working in the adoption of the Biodiversity Information Explorer (BIE), an ALA module which manages taxonomic and species contents by integrating global resources like EOL or Wikipedia. This adoption includes the required modifications to use the data model of the Plinian Core (https://github.com/tdwg/PlinianCore), a TDWG draft standard registered as an IPT extension, oriented to share species level information from local and regional sources too (Pando 2018). The advancement of Plinian Core has been lead by INBio, the Spanish Node of GBIF (GBIF Spain), the University of Granada (UG, Spain), the Alexander von Humboldt Institute (IAvH, Colombia), the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio, Mexico) and the University of Sao Paulo (USP, Brazil). This group reviewed the existing data standards to reuse as many elements as possible and avoid redundancy. Besides the aforementioned, Plinian Core is currently used by other institutions like the Chilean Ministry of Environment. Plinian Core was designed to be easy to use, self-contained, able to support data integration from multiple databases, and having the ability to handle different levels of granularity. These requirements are the result of actual needs from content creators that, through an iterative process, have yielded a more complete and flexible exchange standard to aggregate biological and non-biological species information, used by others like IBIN, the Indian Bioresource Information Network (Saran et al. 2018). Plinian Core aims to be a component in producing multiple species catalogues developed under specific constraints to serve specific purposes, instead of focusing on a unified platform while facilitating consistent aggregation and re-utilization of information (GBIF.org 2015). We will present our implementation of the BIE module in the Atlas of Living Costa Rica, following the documented best practices when sharing species level information using Plinian Core. Our demonstration will detail our lessons learned from merging the aforementioned 5000 species pages provided by INBio with several thousand of species pages assembled from the information provided by the World Flora Online through the aggregation of different Flora resources, like Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica (Hammel et al. 2003) that provides 5,000 plants descriptions and 350 vernacular names (http://www.worldfloraonline.org/resource?query=Manual+de+Plantas+de+Costa+Rica).

Over the past 20 years, the Luxembourg National Museum for Natural History (LMNH) has built a bio- and geodiversity information system to collate, manage and publish natural heritage observation and specimen data on a national and international level. To date the system counts over 2 million taxon occurrence and over 100,000 specimen records. The Museum has chosen, whenever available, public or open source software tools complying to international biodiversity data standards for recording, managing and publishing data to increase resilience, stay connected with community initiatives and mutualise development costs. A central component of the Museum’s national data hub is Recorder 6, a client-server database software for wildlife recording developed by the National Biodiversity Network in the UK. Today, the Recorder-Lux database contains a large portion of natural heritage information in Luxembourg and is synchronised daily into a publication database connected via the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Moreover, Recorder-Lux data is accessible via the national species mapping portal mdata.mnhn.lu which has been developed in-house and is aimed at scientists, professionals and decision makers. The Museum has also developed a set of data entry and upload functionalities on its website data.mnhn.lu using the open source software Indicia, a toolkit that provides a ready-made set of services and tools for online wildlife recording. In 2019, we implement the Atlas of Living Luxembourg (ALL) website all.mnhn.lu, based on the open source Atlas of Living Australia software. ALL is the most comprehensive data portal about natural heritage in Luxembourg, showing specimen data from the museum’s botany, zoology, paleontology, petrology and mineralogy collections as well as fungi, animal and plant observations collected from national and international organisations (via GBIF). Data providers vary from individual scientific collaborators to professional regional record centers or private consultancies working for public administrations. They use different tools offered by the museum to enter, manage and transfer their data to the system. Thus several regional record centers chose the client-server Recorder 6 software to manage and exchange their data, whereas individual scientific collaborators of the Museum enter or upload their data via the online data entry forms available on data.mnhn.lu. For large-scale, long-term, professional biodiversity monitoring and inventories at the national level, specific data entry forms and functionalities have been configured on the Indicia website. Finally, citizens can record species observations via the iNaturalist smartphone app. Due to the museum’s long history of conducting field inventories alongside collating and managing natural history collections, the data hub holds observation and collection data in one database. In 2003, the Museum has developed the Collection Management and Thesaurus extensions for the Recorder 6 software to catalogue, describe and manage specimens in the Museum collections. It allows handling of field-gathered data alongside specimen-specific data such as storage location, specimen type and conservation status. In recent years this has become an essential tool for the increasing effort directed at the digitisation of the diverse natural history collections at the Museum. Our small database team faces the challenge of integrating an ever increasing number of records from a variety of datasets, tools and initiatives. To keep the technical and administrative work as simple as possible we have implemented an open data policy and aim to increase the use of IPT to connect databases instead of physically importing all data into one central database. To improve data quality we focus on training experts to work with our Indicia verification tool.

The Atlas of Living Costa Rica (http://www.crbio.cr/) is a biodiversity data portal, based on the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), which provides integrated, free, and open access to data and information about Costa Rican biodiversity in order to support science, education, and conservation. It is managed by the Biodiversity Informatics Research Center (CRBio) and the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio). Currently, the Atlas of Living Costa Rica includes nearly 8 million georeferenced species occurrence records, mediated by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which come from more than 900 databases and have been published by research centers in 36 countries. Half of those records are published by Costa Rican institutions. In addition, CRBio is making a special effort to enrich and share more than 5000 species pages, developed by INBio, about Costa Rican vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs, nematodes, plants and fungi. These pages contain information elements pertaining to, for instance, morphological descriptions, distribution, habitat, conservation status, management, nomenclature and multimedia. This effort is aligned with collaboration established by Costa Rica with other countries such as Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil to standarize this type of information through Plinian Core (https://github.com/PlinianCore), a set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe different aspects of biological species. The Biodiversity Information Explorer (BIE) is one of the modules made available by ALA which indexes taxonomic and species content and provides a search interface for it. We will present how CRBio is implementing BIE as part of the Atlas of Living Costa Rica in order to share all the information elements contained in the Costa Rican species pages.

A total of ca 800,000 occurrence records from the Australian Museum (AM), Museums Victoria (MV) and the New Zealand Arthropod Collection (NZAC) were audited for changes in selected Darwin Core fields after processing by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA; for AM and MV records) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; for AM, MV and NZAC records). Formal taxon names in the genus- and species-groups were changed in 13–21% of AM and MV records, depending on dataset and aggregator. There was little agreement between the two aggregators on processed names, with names changed in two to three times as many records by one aggregator alone compared to records with names changed by both aggregators. The type status of specimen records did not change with name changes, resulting in confusion as to the name with which a type was associated. Data losses of up to 100% were found after processing in some fields, apparently due to programming errors. The taxonomic usefulness of occurrence records could be improved if aggregators included both original and the processed taxonomic data items for each record. It is recommended that end-users check original and processed records for data loss and name replacements after processing by aggregators.

Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) [*1] framework is an open source infrastructure used to share biodiversity data through severals modules. Adding datasets in ALA is an important step that give access to occurrences. Setting of parameters needs to be accurate in order to correctly view occurrences. Biocache-hub [*2] is an interface that allows research on ingested occurrences by Biocache-store [*3]. It's an advanced data explorer with filters. This training will be divided in two parts. First part will provide tools and techniques to add datasets, from a csv local resource to a GBIF dataset DWC file, within the administration management of the Collectory module [*4]. It will also present the important steps to link occurrences with datasets and how to update a dataset. Second part, within user view, will present the access to occurrences and options available from a Simple search to a Spatial search.

Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)*1 is a Biodiversity Information System that has been developed to support the Biodiversity community. It offers access to open data allowing queries, downloads and interoperability. It uses standards to show and make accessible the information: JSON*2, Darwin Core Archive*3 and OGC*4. And users can see the data, have access to the metadata at different levels (occurrence, dataset, collection, institution, data provider...) ALA is developed on an architecture based on RESTFUL*5 web services and it is composed of several components that interact with each other using those services to reach a common goal: making biodiversity information that exists more accessible around the world. Some ALA components are Search engine (or generic-hub*6), Registry (or generic-collectory*7), Data ingestion (biocache-store*8), Species (generic-bie*9), Geospatial (spatial-portal*10),... and more components that you can find in the GitHub*11 repository. In this training session, we will focus on the Registry component (collectory-plugin*12). This component allows us to manage the information related to datasets, collections, institutions, data providers, contacts and generate reports associated with those entities. This training will be split into 4 sections. The first will present how it technically works. The second section will present the administrator panel. In this section, we will see how to create/modify/delete the different entities and how they have been composed. We will also show how to create the relation between institutions, collections, and datasets with providers code and theirs mapping. At the end, we will present the reports available on ALA administrator webpage. In the third section, we will show the user collectory interface and the structure of metadata available. The fourth section, we will present an overview of the collectory web service API. Note: We will use the Spanish data portal*13 to explain each section.

Biocache-store: Command-Line Interface tool for managing occurrence records

Since 2010, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) provides information on all the known species in Australia and contributes to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). By lending access to this national open source platform, the open and modular architecture of ALA enables re-use of ALA tools by other countries and regions. Over the years, thanks to the ALA team and GBIF, the community has grown in different ways from production to training courses. Firstly, data portals based on ALA but residing outside Australia, have been launched in several institutions such as INBIO in Costa Rica and Canadensys in Canada, and in the GBIF network via at least six nodes presently operating national ALA-based portals (e.g., Spain, Portugal, France, Sweden, Argentina, United Kingdom). Others will follow in the coming years (e.g., Colombia, Peru). Other countries, such as Andorra and Benin, have also begun to develop their own installations with the aid of partners in the Living Atlases Community. Secondly, we are now able to set up workshops geared to different levels of expertise. At TDWG 2017 we will propose both beginner's and advanced workshops. Thirdly, the experience gained by installing and customizing their own data portals has allowed many advanced participants to share their expertise in subjects like internationalization, data management, and customization, with others during workshops. Adding to these points, as an open source software, developers contribute to the community by implementing new functionalities and improving the translation into several languages for users of the software. Today, some modules are fully translated into Spanish, French, and Portuguese. In this poster, we will show the human aspect of the project by introducing the Living Atlases, an international community created around the ALA framework, highlighting how re-using existing software can be motivating and stimulating. We will also present the new official website that we will launch through the GBIF Capacity Enhancement Support Programme (CESP)*1 around the next advanced workshop and future projects planned in order to increase the durability of our community.

Aggregators such as the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) have recently been criticised for imposing "backbone taxonomies" on records provided by museums, herbaria and other sources. Taxon names may be changed to suit the backbone, with the result that the taxon rank of the record may change and the originally provided name may no longer be searchable online through the aggregator. Aggregators may also delete data items, either by omitting entire fields or rejecting data items not conforming to aggregator-specific data standards. Modifications are more common than deletions and are particularly worrying in geospatial, date and recorder data fields. It can be difficult to locate originally provided data on aggregator websites, even for individual records, and bulk downloads from aggregators typically mask the changes made. In this presentation I document the loss and modification of biodiversity data items by aggregators and suggest strategies for museums and herbaria to counter data loss and modification.

Since 2010 the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) gives information on all the known species in Australia and contributes to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). To provide a suitable framework for national needs, ALA and GBIF worked together and created a technical community around the platform developed by ALA. This one is called Living Atlases. Through this community, members can be helped during the installation and configuration of modules based on this architecture by the ALA technical team or other participants. Since 2013, several beginner and advanced workshops have been made focusing on various ALA tools. Because the level of the community members has increased, some former trainees have become new trainers. Added to these technical workshops, we have been able to present and demonstrate our work during international conferences with always the main goal to show how re-using an existing software can be motivating and stimulating as well as be part of a living community. Indeed, ten institutions members to Living Atlases launched their national data portal. In the future, we expect more GBIF nodes to put their software in production (Andorra, Germany, Benin, Luxembourg, etc.). During this introduction, we will present the community by showing past events as well as presentations done during previous conferences. Then, we will describe the human aspect of the project by presenting the international community and listing some key points of the software such as internationalization or customization. We will finish it by explaining the future of the Living Atlases community and how you can contribute and be part of it.