While some species have millions of observations recorded in the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), many lesser-known species have few or even no public records. The ALA has been working to improve taxonomic representativeness of our data with a little help from the international community!
So how do we get more rare records? Species specimens from museums or herbaria are invaluable sources for this task. The thing is, getting access to specimen data isn’t always easy.
One challenge stems from a strength of taxonomy: It’s a global discipline. Natural history specimens are sent around the world to experts for careful description and classification. This means that specimens, including those of Australian species, can end up anywhere on the planet.
Another challenge is getting access to specimen data. Digitising specimens helps to make important specimens discoverable by end users. Museums and herbaria face a vast task in digitising their collections, and even though Australia is one of the leading countries in this respect, when there are only one or two existing specimens of a species in the world, it can be difficult to even find these amidst the ocean of specimens awaiting digitisation!
While progress continues to be made digitising the global backlog, it is important to also gather existing lesser-known datasets with digitised specimen data – digitally catalogued physical specimens, photographs or sounds (and metadata about the place and time they were recorded). People often don’t think to look in international digital specimen datasets for data on Australian species.
The ALA is fortunate to partner with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an international repository of many regional and national Living Atlases like the ALA. From GBIF, the ALA was able to source an additional three million records of Australian species to the ALA’s 150 million records.
These additional records have provided the first digital records of a whopping 7,914 Australian species. Another 6,177 had the number of records doubled.
The result is even more exciting for threatened species. These GBIF data have contributed more than 72,703 records of 1,393 federally threatened species! Crucially, GBIF data has contributed records for 482 data-poor species (species with less than 80 records). For another seven threatened species, these data provided their first Australian digital records.
Improving the taxonomic breadth of Australian species records in the ALA is incredibly important for both science and conservation.
More species with openly accessible data means scientists can save time and effort searching for data, having positive impacts on conservation assessments and modelling.