The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a comprehensive resource for exploring biodiversity. It provides detailed species information, including occurrence records, descriptions, images, and location data. You can search for species, explore by location, and download data – all open and accessible with a free ALA account.

Citizen scientists can record sightings and participate in data collection and digitisation projects. Technical users can access APIs, R and Python packages, and data providers can collaborate with the ALA to share their datasets.

Search, explore and download

Find species information

The ALA species pages display text descriptions, images, location information, taxonomic details and links to academic literature for the species and higher taxonomic groups in our database.

Explore by location

By bringing together species information alongside location information, the ALA enables you to explore the biodiversity in the area or region of your choice.

  • Explore Your Area – see which species have been observed in a particular location.
  • Explore Regions – browse pre-defined regions such as states/territories, local government areas, and biogeographic regions.

Download data

Data can be downloaded in a number of different formats, just look for a prominent “Download” button on any of the following sections of our site:

Contribute

Record a sighting

If you have seen an interesting plant, animal, or fungus in your area, why not record your sighting? You can do this using a citizen science app on your phone.

Join a citizen science project

BioCollect is the ALA’s citizen science project portal. Our citizen science project finder lets you search biodiversity-related citizen projects across Australia and directs you to the host organisation.

If you are a scientist wanting to harness the power of the citizen science community, BioCollect enables you to set up a project, facilitates data collection and helps manage your data.

Help digitise museum collections

DigiVol is a crowdsourcing platform that enables volunteers to digitise museum collection records. Anyone can become a DigiVol volunteer, all you need is a computer, internet access and an email address.

Digivol was developed by the Australian Museum in collaboration with the ALA.

Access ALA data programmatically

Access data using R or Python

ALA’s galah is an interface to biodiversity data, enabling users to locate and download species occurrence records, taxonomic information, or associated media such as images or sounds, using R or Python.

Access our APIs

The ALA Application Programming Interface (API) allows third-party websites and developers to access many of the features of the ALA site. The API is a collection of web services that provide HTTP access to JSON, XML, CSV and WMS data types.

Share a dataset

Information for data providers

If you are in biodiversity research, collections, government, industry or a related field and already have a collection of species sightings, they can be submitted to the ALA as a dataset rather than one at a time.

To submit a dataset, your data must be in a structured format suitable for loading into the ALA. The ALA uses the Darwin Core data standard, and we have a user guide available to assist you with this.