Welcome to the March 2025 edition of our Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) newsletter.
In December I had the privilege of attending a fantastic event on the topic of Nationally Distributed Collections Infrastructure to Solve Global Research Challenges, as a side event to International Conference on Research Infrastructures held in Brisbane. The ALA hosted the event in partnership with the Queensland Museum, Phenomics Australia and CSIRO.
The event focussed on the fundamental role research collections and biobanks play in supporting science, decision-making, and industry applications which has received renewed interest, given technological advances that can rapidly generate new data and insights from physical specimens. Novel techniques in genomics, advanced imaging, and, increasingly artificial intelligence and machine learning, means that more information than ever can be derived from Australia’s research collections.
The event brought together international and local experts from across the collections and biobanking sector to explore a number of areas that are seen as critical for supporting future science needs, including (a) Collection digitisation, storage and management, (b) Digital infrastructure, data access and integration, (c) Emerging transformational technology, (d) Skills and workforce development, and finally (e) Sectoral leadership.
The importance of Indigenous data sovereignty and the opportunity to improve how a future state incorporates non-Western knowledge systems was also identified as fundamental.
With ALA’s historic focus on partnering with Australia’s biological collections sector, it was great to see the parallels within other domains such as human health biobanking and it’s clear there is much to be gained for partnering further.
The ICRI congress itself was fantastic and inspiring to see the current ‘state of the research infrastructure’ internationally, across a number of domain areas. Several ICRI presentations remain available at https://www.youtube.com/@ICRI2024/videos and I encourage you to view some of these as they so effectively highlight the strength of Australia’s research infrastructure system, and future opportunities confronting our sector.
I hope you enjoy reading our March 2025 Newsletter.
Dr Andre Zerger, ALA Director.