EcoAssets

The Challenge

Australia’s State of the Environment (SoE) report is produced every 5 years to meet the federal government’s statutory reporting obligations. It relies extensively on high-quality national environmental data.

The EcoAssets project will integrate biodiversity data to support Australia’s SoE future reports.

The Response

To improve input to the SoE, EcoAssets will contribute newly developed data assets that are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). This will add significant value to the SoE report, and other activities such as environmental accounting and impact assessments.  

The EcoAssets project involves six elements.

SoE report requirements and evaluation – Refine planned priority data assets and document requirements including implementation plan for each NCRIS facility.

Data pipelines developed – Enhance internal data pipelines for TERN, IMOS, and ALA to feed into EcoAssets and deliver early versions of data assets.

Versioned access of data assets – Versioned access put in place for data assets. This includes their presentation via an online summary catalogue.

Public versions of data assets – Data assets become available for use and reference by SoE chapter authors.

Data pipelines established – Data pipelines established as part of the persistent and lasting data infrastructure for TERN, IMOS, and ALA.

Plan development for data asset discovery – Plans will be put in place for the wider discovery of data assets through national and international information platforms

Who Will Benefit

Researchers, research organisations, government (state and commonwealth) and data analysts will benefit from the project’s core features:

• improvements to data pipelines that offer standard views of the biodiversity component of data collected during TERN and IMOS field programs for aggregation with ALA data streams
• aggregating similar data from partners that will serve as reference assets and a baseline for future environmental assessment. Data includes species distribution, monitoring activity and growth in biodiversity knowledge
• a single set of data for major environmental products from the NCRIS infrastructures, with standardised metadata, spatial and temporal units and other facets to support SoE.

The Partners

Our partners are:

• ALA
• TERN
• Integrated Marine Observing System 
• Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.

Target Outcomes

This project will enable streamlined national reporting of biodiversity information, using the SoE 2021 report as a focus. Data linkages and summary formats will provide easy-to-access information on indicators and trends. Data pipelines developed will enable future continuous updates and integration of new data from partners.