Curated Biodiversity Data for Rapid Assessment of Bushfire Impacts

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 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