Back to index
Back to handheld edition
Issue 52 | May 2009
Lord Howe Stag beetles
Image credit: Carl Bento,
Australian Museum
The announcement of a $30 million increase in funding for the Atlas of Living Australia ($10m in 2009-10) has been welcomed as an important foundational step in the deeper understanding of national biodiversity.
Group Executive for Agribusiness, Joanne Daly, said the funding will help develop the Atlas of Living Australia into a world-class research tool.
Hosted by CSIRO and in collaboration with partners in government, museums and the universities, the program is developing a biodiversity data management system that will link Australia's biological knowledge with its scientific and agricultural reference collections and other custodians of biological information.
'To have integrated information on all Australian species, including data on specimens held by Australia's natural history collections and data from field observations of living organisms, is a very valuable research tool', Joanne said.
'The funds will allow CSIRO and our partners to support the management and integration of biological data from all areas of research, from molecular to ecological.'
The program will develop search interfaces and web services to facilitate discovery of biological information resources and to support the use of biological data in scientific research, policy-making and education.
The Atlas of Living Australia is funded under the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
