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Sharing Queensland wildlife data

The data

The Queensland Government, through the Open Data portal, provides access to WildNet information approved for public release. WildNet is used by the government to manage wildlife data collected from public and private sector sources. The WildNet data on the portal is accessed using the Queensland Government’s wildlife data API (Application Programming Interface).

The user

The Atlas of Living Australia, a major national partnership of Australian museums, herbaria, the CSIRO, a range of government agencies and other entities with biological collections, accesses Queensland’s wildlife information using the wildlife data API.

The business benefit

Since making 103,000 WildNet fauna records available in the Atlas on 29 May 2014, there have been more than 1900 downloads, delivering 33 million records to researchers, policy makers and anyone interested in Australia’s unique plants and animals.

Over the coming months, the Queensland Government intends to make additional WildNet data available through the Queensland Government’s Open Data portal.

Specimen data from the Queensland Museum and Queensland Herbarium are also incorporated within the Atlas.

About the Atlas

The Atlas is a truly national database allowing free access to information on Australia’s flora and fauna. It has a wide range of uses, including:

  • improving our understanding of Australian biodiversity
  • assisting researchers build a more detailed picture of Australia’s biodiversity
  • assisting environmental managers and policy makers develop more effective means of managing and sustaining Australia’s biodiversity.

The Atlas also has strong relationships with related international organisations for sharing biodiversity data and is the Australian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Funding for the Atlas was provided by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the Super Science Initiative (SSI), part of the Education Investment Fund.

Using the Atlas, researchers can map, analyse and visualize biodiversity data alongside a wide range of environmental and contextual information, such as climate and land use.

The Atlas is open source and all data is free to download and reusable.

Access to the WildNet data lets us develop a fuller understanding of the overall health of our biodiversity - Dr John La Salle Director, Atlas of Living Australia

For more information

For more information about the Atlas of Living Australia, go to http://www.ala.org.au/.

To access Queensland Government data, bookmark http://data.qld.gov.au.