Today we release our Atlas of Living Australia Strategy 2020-2025.

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) strategy has been shaped extensively by input from our national and international partners who contributed so actively to our 2019 ALA Future Directions national consultation process.

As Australia’s national biodiversity data infrastructure and one of the world’s foremost such capabilities, we rely on the strength of our partnerships with data providers, users and stakeholders. Indeed, the genesis of the ALA was built on the strength and richness of existing relationships within the museums, collections and herbaria communities.

Australia’s fruitful partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) also provides our community a unique opportunity to ensure that local, regional or national biodiversity data delivers impact globally. The ALA is particularly proud of the relationship we play hosting the Australian node of GBIF.

Supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), and hosted by CSIRO, the ALA website launched 10 years ago. Since those beginnings the ALA has matured from an energetic ‘start-up’ to a stable and reliable data infrastructure delivering world-trusted biodiversity data and related services.

Our strategy builds on this history while identifying where we need to evolve. This includes adapting our infrastructure to deal with an increase in volume and variety of data, improving how we deal with data quality in a federated system, delivering more comprehensive and representative national data holdings, and partnering with new sectors.

We welcome further conversations with our partners to identify possible alignment opportunities framed around our strategy.

Please contact us at support@ala.org.au if you would like more information or if you have any questions.