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A nationally significant collection of mayflies that has been amassed and curated at Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand is described. A project to formally catalogue the backlog of this collection was completed in 2018. This collection has been primarily worked on, added to, and curated by Terry Hitchings since the early 1990s, with his son Tim Hitchings assisting this work since the late 2000s. This paper outlines this process involved in cataloguing the collection and preparing the data for publication to online biorepositories. The dataset was published to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in late 2021. This dataset contains just under 49,000 published specimen records with high quality field collection information. It represents nearly all currently described mayfly species in New Zealand. Areas of collecting focus include most of the South Island of New Zealand, with collecting gaps in South Westland and Marlborough. There are large collecting gaps throughout the North Island of New Zealand. An overview of the trends shown in the dataset is provided. Future work is identified and recommended to enhance and improve this dataset to highlight and promote freshwater ecosystems in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A nationally significant collection of mayflies that has been amassed and curated at Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand is described. A project to formally catalogue the backlog of this collection was completed in 2018. This collection has been primarily worked on, added to, and curated by Terry Hitchings since the early 1990s, with his son Tim Hitchings assisting this work since the late 2000s. This paper outlines this process involved in cataloguing the collection and preparing the data for publication to online biorepositories. The dataset was published to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in late 2021. This dataset contains just under 49,000 published specimen records with high quality field collection information. It represents nearly all currently described mayfly species in New Zealand. Areas of collecting focus include most of the South Island of New Zealand, with collecting gaps in South Westland and Marlborough. There are large collecting gaps throughout the North Island of New Zealand. An overview of the trends shown in the dataset is provided. Future work is identified and recommended to enhance and improve this dataset to highlight and promote freshwater ecosystems in New Zealand.

The 19 BIOCLIM variables available from the WorldClim databases have become the most widely used set of climatic variables for creating species distribution models (SDMs) and ecological niche models (ENMs). Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been an increasing trend to exclude four of these variables from SDM/ENM analyses. The four values concerned are interactive as they combine both temperature and precipitation assessments. Their exclusion was justified initially due to discontinuities in their interpolated surfaces observed in a study using data from version 1 of WorldClim. The discontinuities were thought to be artefacts of the measures used, and such sudden changes were unlikely to be biologically meaningful. A freely available biodiversity database and an open access geographic information system were used here to check the four interactive variables for discontinuities in data from both versions 1 and 2 of WorldClim. Over most of the world, the four interactive BIOCLIM variables from WorldClim were found to change smoothly. Major and minor discontinuities, however, were noted for all four variables in specific parts of some of the six continents (excluding Antarctica) covered by WorldClim databases. Discontinuities were related to sudden changes in the quarterly periods used to calculate the variables. These discontinuities were often found in equatorial regions where there are only small changes in temperature across the year. Bimodal precipitation distributions may also cause problems. It is recommended that the quick and simple method described here should be used to facilitate visual inspection and numerical checking for possible discontinuities of these variables before SDM/ENM analyses. If discontinuities are found for an interactive variable in the study area, it is recommended that the variable should not be used. Ways in which the four variables could be recalculated when new databases are created are suggested to reduce discontinuity problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the biogeography of the Australian Camphorosmeae (Amaranthaceae s.l. ) lineage and how it relates to shifts in climatic niche and habitat types. Building on previous research and data resources, we integrate molecular phylogenetics, bioclimatic data and biogeographical models to deepen our understanding of the diversification and adaptation of this group across Australia's diverse landscapes in relation to palaeoclimatic changes. For 159 species representing 12 genera, georeferenced distribution points were used to define the most informative bioclimatic variables using principal component analysis. Evolutionary shifts in climatic niches and habitat types were analysed, revealing clade-specific shifts and adaptations to different habitats and climatic conditions. Biogeographical analyses allowed us to infer ancestral areas of Camphorosmeae in Australia and relate their expansion over evolutionary time to habitat shifts. Preadaptation of this group to warm and dry habitats coupled with key periods of aridification in Australia, particularly during the Late Miocene to Pliocene, were critical in driving its diversification through migration and local adaptation to varied habitats of arid Australia. Our analyses suggest that the 'Riverine Desert' habitat offered suitable conditions for ancestral Australian Camphorosmeae and facilitated their early widespread dispersal in the Western and Eastern Desert. We hypothesise that early diverging lineages such as Roycea adapted to the later emerging 'Desert Lake' habitat when it spread in Western Australia during the Early Pliocene. Further, habitat type shifts occurred from 'Riverine Desert' to 'Shield Plain', 'Karst Plain' and to 'Sand Desert' also during the Pliocene and Pleistocene once these habitat types emerged. This study illustrates the complex interplay between ecological flexibility and niche conservatism in shaping the biodiversity of Australian Camphorosmeae., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest., (© 2024 The Author(s). Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

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.

Conservation biology is a field of science that is heavily biased against insects and allied invertebrates, largely due to a data deficiency feedback loop that maintains a cycle of ignorance and inaction. Because many invertebrate groups are, and remain, extremely data poor, it is frequently difficult to conduct even the most basic conservation actions, such as status evaluation, listing, recovery and monitoring of threatened species. Thus, declines and extinctions of invertebrates are frequently undetected and poorly documented. To address this data deficiency, we have developed a new national database – Butterflies Australia – for one insect taxon that integrates citizen science (data collectors) with global, standardised monitoring protocols and emerging tools in technology and biodiversity informatics. The database is created from a platform, which consists of a phone app and website, that offers the potential to rapidly increase data availability on the occurrence of Australian butterflies at a far greater scale than was previously possible, as well as to monitor trends in their distribution and abundance over time. We discuss the attributes and importance of successful citizen science projects and quantitative methods for monitoring butterflies, both from an Australian perspective and in an international context, and then outline the operational aspects of the Butterflies Australia platform. A review of survey methods that have been used for monitoring or inventorying butterflies in Australia over the past 50 years revealed a diverse array of sampling techniques, with little standardisation between studies and wide variation in space (sampling unit) and time (sampling effort). Transect counts, in particular, have rarely followed the international guidelines recommended for standardised global butterfly monitoring. Finally, we discuss the benefits of our new citizen science tool for butterflies and potentially other invertebrates. We envisage that our platform will engender increased community awareness, improved quantity and quality of data collection, better conservation policy and planning, as well as enhanced resourcing and research for the conservation management of butterflies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Spatial information about the location and suitability of areas for native plant and animal species under different climate futures is an important input to land use and conservation planning and management. Australia, renowned for its abundant species diversity and endemism, often relies on modeled data to assess species distributions due to the country's vast size and the challenges associated with conducting on-ground surveys on such a large scale. The objective of this article is to develop habitat suitability maps for Australian flora and fauna under different climate futures., Results: Using MaxEnt, we produced Australia-wide habitat suitability maps under RCP2.6-SSP1, RCP4.5-SSP2, RCP7.0-SSP3, and RCP8.5-SSP5 climate futures for 1,382 terrestrial vertebrates and 9,251 vascular plants vascular plants at 5 km2 for open access. This represents 60% of all Australian mammal species, 77% of amphibian species, 50% of reptile species, 71% of bird species, and 44% of vascular plant species. We also include tabular data, which include summaries of total quality-weighted habitat area of species under different climate scenarios and time periods., Conclusions: The spatial data supplied can help identify important and sensitive locations for species under various climate futures. Additionally, the supplied tabular data can provide insights into the impacts of climate change on biodiversity in Australia. These habitat suitability maps can be used as input data for landscape and conservation planning or species management, particularly under different climate change scenarios in Australia., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press GigaScience.)

Of the 59 woodland bird species investigated in this study, 20 were found to have declined over the last six decades while another 12 species were found to have increased over the same time period. Fifteen species are listed as threatened under the New South Wales Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 and this study identified those same 15 species as being uncommon to rare on the Cumberland Plain. In addition, many other Cumberland Plain woodland bird species are uncommon and are also in decline. Apart from the threatened species it is likely that 12 other species may also be lost from the Cumberland Plain. If the current trends continue, it is likely that we will lose nearly half of the 59 species over the next few decades unless efforts are made to protect and enhance woodland habitat of the Cumberland Plain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 (ht tp://www.worldfloraonline.org/resource?query=Manual+de+Plantas+de+Costa+Rica). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA:http://www.ala.org.au) provides the largest free and open repository of integrated biological and environmental information in a consistent format for the Australian region. As of June 2015, the ALA contained over 55 million records (10% of Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s (GBIF’s) total), consisting of 150,000+ native and alien species, nearly 500 layers of gridded and polygonal bio-environmental data, 39+ million pages of biological literature, and 45,000+ images of species and other integrated biological data. The development of the research interface to the ALA (http://spatial.ala.org.au) was the trigger to develop an architecture designed to tightly integrate environmental data for online use with biological data. Environmental layers are classed as environmental (gridded with continuous values) or contextual (polygonal with discrete class values). A suite of analysis and visualization tools have been developed to demonstrate the value of integrating the ALA’s biological and environmental data. This paper outlines the purpose and process of establishing the ALA and discusses the integration of environmental data relevant to biodiversity research in the Australian region and the vision for continually improved services for research, area management, education, and citizen science. The ALA’s environmental infrastructure addresses current needs but increased data types, volumes, and resolution suggests new directions are needed to provide quality services into the future. The experience of building the ALA has relevance for other agencies setting up similar infrastructure which supports integrated access to and use of their national biological and environmental information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriate selection of environmental variables is critical to the performance of biodiversity models, but has received less attention than the choice of modelling method. Online aggregators of biological and environmental data, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia, necessitate a rational approach to variable selection. We outline a set of general principles for systematically identifying, compiling, evaluating and selecting environmental variables for a biodiversity model. Our approach aims to maximise the information obtained from the analysis of biological records linked to a potentially large suite of spatial environmental variables. We demonstrate the utility of this structured framework through case studies with Australian vascular plants: regional modelling of a species distribution, continent-wide modelling of species compositional turnover and environmental classification. The approach is informed by three components of a biodiversity model: (1) an ecological framework or conceptual model, (2) a data model concerning availability, resolution and variable selection and (3) a method for analysing data. We expand the data model in structuring the problem of choosing environmental variables. The case studies demonstrate a structured approach for the: (1) cost-effective compilation of variables in the context of an explicit ecological framework for the study, attribute accuracy and resolution; (2) evaluation of non-linear relationships between variables using knowledge of their derivation, scatter plots and dissimilarity matrices; (3) selection and grouping of variables based on hypotheses of relative ecological importance and perceived predictor effectiveness; (4) systematic testing of variables as predictors through the process of model building and refinement and (5) model critique, inference and synthesis using direct gradient analysis to evaluate the shape of response curves in the context of ecological theory by presenting predictions in both geographic and environmental space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been an increasing investment of taxpayer dollars in revegetation in Australia over the past 20 years, at both federal and state levels. The largest of these, the Australian Government's Biodiversity Fund, will invest A$946 million to revegetate, rehabilitate and restore landscapes to store carbon, enhance biodiversity and build environmental resilience under climate change. The universal challenge for restoration practitioners working within these programmes is species selection for both current and future environmental conditions at a given site. For policy makers, the challenge is to provide guidelines and tools for this process. The first paper in this series of two papers looked at scientific methods that could provide underpinning knowledge to improve the assessment of species vulnerability to climatic and atmospheric change. In this paper, the publically accessible Atlas of Living Australia is used to demonstrate how revegetation project leaders can assess whether the species and provenances used in their revegetation projects are likely to be suitable for changing environmental conditions. While using the Atlas can assist current selections, ways in which more reliable selections for changing climatic conditions could be made are also outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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., (Lee Belbin, Elycia Wallis, Donald Hobern, Andre Zerger.)

During the last few years, a large number of countries have deployed national customized versions of The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) (https://www.ala.org.au/), which is a collaboratively developed, open infrastructure for collecting and presenting biodiversity data nationally and for sharing it globally through GBIF (https://gbif.org). The increasing number of national nodes deploying this free and open source software platform has built a worldwide community involving more than 17 countries, that collaborate openly in a decentralized way (https://living-atlases.gbif.org/), helping each other out by organizing technical workshops and by developing and sharing new software modules using GitHub. One of these modules in the Living Atlases infrastructure is an R package called ALA4R originally created by Ben Raymond (https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia/ALA4R). It provides the research community with programmatic data access to many of the Living Atlases data services using R. This presentation will show how ALA4R can be used to access data from different national Living Atlases nodes and how this R package can enable research studies that utilize methods and practices for reproducible workflows that are being increasingly established within the research community (https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/guide-to-reproducible-code.pdf). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many organisations running citizen science projects don't have access to or the knowledge or means to develop databases and apps for their projects. Some are also concerned about long-term data management and also how to make the data that they collect accessible and impactful in terms of scientific research, policy and management outcomes. To solve these issues, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) has developed BioCollect. BioCollect is a sophisticated, yet simple to use tool which has been built in collaboration with hundreds of real users who are actively involved in field data capture. It has been developed to support the needs of scientists, ecologists, citizen scientists and natural resource managers in the field-collection and management of biodiversity, ecological and natural resource management (NRM) data. BioCollect is a cloud-based facility hosted by the ALA and also includes associated mobile apps for offline data collection in the field. BioCollect provides form-based structured data collection for: 1. Ad-hoc survey-based records; 2. Method-based systematic structured surveys; and 3. Activity-based projects such as natural resource management intervention projects (eg. revegetation, site restoration, seed collection, weed and pest management, etc.). This session will cover how BioCollect is being used for citizen science in Australia and some of the features of the tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) (https://www.ala.org.au/) is a collaborative, open infrastructure for sharing biodiversity data. The software and tools are publicly available for reuse and customization (https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia). GBIF Sweden, hosted at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, is in the process of deploying the Swedish data portal (BioAtlas Sweden - https://bioatlas.se/) adopting the components from ALA. GBIF Sweden serves over 66 million occurrence records and is one of the biggest contributors to the GBIF Network. The requirement for managing of this volume of data led to implementation of the components from ALA in the Swedish data portal. This presentation provides a technical overview of one of the tools from ALA, the Biocachestore. The functionalities for loading, sampling, processing and indexing of occurrence records using the command-line interface tool will be covered in depth. Additional functionalities to support outliers detection, duplicate detection and identifying extra-limital outliers based on authoritative distribution polygons for taxa shall be demonstrated. Following the demonstration, there will be time to explore the features of the presented tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]