Who will benefit
Researchers and decision makers needing to quantify impacts on biodiversity of natural disasters, such as bushfires
Program
The Challenge
The Atlas of Living Australia stores over 100 million observations of Australian plants and animals, making it a valuable resource for understanding where species live. This information is critically important for quantifying the impacts on biodiversity of natural disasters such as bushfires. Researchers face several challenges in quantifying the impacts of bushfire on biodiversity:
- Since ALA primarily aggregates data from external providers, the quality of data may vary, hence limiting its utility in some cases.
- Extensive time and resources are needed to curate data prior to conducting any modelling exercise of bushfire impacts.
- On completing a project, there are few channels for researchers to share the data they have created.
The Approach
The project:
- produced and shared a combined, curated biodiversity data asset for southeastern Australia, covering a range of taxonomic groups, and allowing rapid application to future bushfires or other natural disasters.
- incorporated edits and annotations by expert users back into the main ALA dataset, enriching the data resource for a range of users.
- aggregated knowledge from different research teams to implement best-practice data cleaning workflows at the ALA, allowing improved data cleaning at scale.
- provided mechanisms to capture and share common analysis methods from bushfire research, including species distribution models (SDMs).
The Outcomes
In this project, the ALA collaborated with experts to create a curated biodiversity dataset that can be used off-the-shelf for bushfire impact modelling. Access the data.
Who Will Benefit
The Partners
- Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)
- University of Melbourne
- National Research Collections Australia (CSIRO)
- Invertebrates Australia
Further Resources
- “Quantifying species range and overlap with fire-burned areas using concave hulls”, an ALA Labs article by Fonti Kar and Margot Schneider
- An online book and code for cleaning data by ALA
- Galaxias, an R package developed by ALA to simplify converting biodiversity data into Darwin Core archives
Contact the ARDC
Timeframe
April 2022 to June 2023
Current Phase
Complete
ARDC Co-investment
$350,000
Project lead
Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)
Categories
Research Topic
Related Resources
Featured
Dataset, Guide, Tool / Service
Access datasets, tools and other resources created or enhanced through the ARDC’s Bushfire Data Challenges…
Related Projects
- Bushfire Research Data Management Plans
- Aggregating and Integrating Data on Health Outcomes Associated with Bushfires at a National Scale
- Assessing the Impact of Bushfire Smoke on Health
- Establishing an Australian Reference Genome Atlas and Leadership Application in Bushfire Data
- Development of a Traits Database and Vulnerability Framework to Assess Fire Susceptibility of Australian Invertebrate Species
- Bushfire Data Access and Impact Modelling Platform