The Atlas of Living Australia: History, current state and future directions

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is Australia’s national biodiversity database, delivering data and related services to more than 80,000 Australian and international users annually. Established under the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy to provide trusted biodiversity data to support the research sector, its utility now extends to government, higher education, non-government organisations and community groups. These partners provide data to the ALA and leverage its data and related services. The ALA has also played an important leadership role internationally in the biodiversity informatics and infrastructure space, both through its partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and through support for the international Living Atlases programmes which has now delivered 24 instances of ALA software to deliver sovereign biodiversity data capability around the world. This paper begins with a historical overview of the genesis of the ALA from the collections, museums and herbaria community in Australia. It details the biodiversity and related data and services delivered to users with a primary focus on species occurrence records which represent the ALA's primary data type. Finally, the paper explores the ALA's future directions by referencing results from a recently completed national consultation process.