Conservation Atlas Surveys

The University of Queensland

Description

In the first few decades of European settlement, records of Australian vegetation ranged from descriptions by explorers and new settlers, artists’ drawings, through to specimens sent to international herbaria and museums. In the late 19th century more systematic observations were published and form the basis of today’s quantitative approaches. In the 1980s a project was conducted in which data across the continent of Australia from 711 terrestrial and littoral vegetation surveys were collected and digitised to enable an objective assessment of the conservation status of Australian plant communities, the ‘Conservation Atlas’ project (Specht et al. 1995, Specht and Specht, 2013). The source files (reprints and reports) were retained as completely as possible, while the extracted data were retained as print outs and/or stored digitally using the technology current at the time.

The data delivered through the Atlas of Living Australia (and as a full data package through the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity: http://doi.org/10.5063/F1QC01QK ; Specht et al., 2018a) is the result of an effort to retrieve the data from the Conservation Atlas project. Accessible paper and digital sources were obtained and re-entered where required, georeferences and sources were updated. This work resulted in a collection of sites x species observation records mapped to Darwin Core format. The data from 1390 communities incorporating records of 9450 taxa were retrieved from a total of 705 sources between 1879 to 1989. This was a considerable loss from the initial project, but substantial nevertheless. The project aimed to provide a sustainable open-access resource to the research community and others to enable better long-term comprehension of vegetation change, and to provide insight into the long-term challenges of effective data curation.

The details of the retrieval project can be obtained in Specht et al. (2018).

References

Specht A. and Specht R.L. (2013) Australia: Biodiversity of Ecosystems. In, The Encyclopedia of Biodiversity Vol. 1 (ed. B. Levin, et al.) pp 291-306. Waltham, MA: Academic Press.

Specht, R.L., Specht, A. Whelan, M.B. and Hegarty, E.E. (1995) Conservation Atlas of Plant Communities in Australia. Centre for Coastal Management in association with Southern Cross University Press.

Specht A., Bolton M.P., Kingsford B., Specht R.L., Belbin L. (2018a) Data from the Conservation Atlas of Australian Plant communities 1879-1989 (1995). Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. doi:10.5063/F1QC01QK.

Specht A., Bolton M.P., Kingsford B., Specht R.L., Belbin L. (2018b) A story of data won, data lost and data re-found: the realities of ecological data preservation. Biodiversity Data Journal 6:e28073. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.6.e28073

An extraction of vegetation species by location data from published and unpublished papers and reports

Vegetation composition and structural classification at distinct vegetation communities across Australia: Species x site x source x structural and environmental information.

Geographic Description

Continental Australia

Data quality

Species names had been updated for the Specht et al. (1995) publication but many had changed since then.

a. Use the Atlas of Living Australia’s web services http://api.ala.org.au), and the National Species Lists and Australian Plant Census (CHAH)) to semi-automate the current identification of species names

b. Manually check any ambiguous or missing names

All site locations were checked against the original documents where possible and verified using Google maps (satellite view). Decimal degrees were inserted and comments made of any amendments to an original location together with an estimate of coordinate uncertainty.

Methods

From publications (including 'grey' literature), as described in full in Specht et al. (2018a).

Type of content

Includes: authoritative, point occurrence data.

Citation

Specht A., Bolton M.P., Kingsford B., Specht R.L., Belbin L. (2018) A story of data won, data lost and data re-found: the realities of ecological data preservation. Biodiversity Data Journal 6:e28073. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.6.e28073

Data generalisations

None.

Information withheld

None

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2018-11-20 08:40:29.0