Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) has made a huge number of wildlife records available to the public through the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Australia’s national biodiversity data infrastructure. The data deposit represents a major contribution to the Atlas, including valuable records of threatened species and information from remote and under-represented parts of Australia.

With the help of a grant from the ALA Australian Biodiversity Data Mobilisation Program, AWC employed a dedicated ‘data wrangler’ to assist in transferring over 575,000 wildlife records from human observation, including 310,000 motion sensor camera images, 95,000 capture records, 115,000 from bird surveys, spotlighting and bioacoustics surveys, and 45,000 opportunistic sightings. These records were a culmination of data from the last 22 years of AWC’s conservation work across 6.8 million hectares of remote land owned and/or managed by AWC.

The extensive data transfer was supported by Safe Software, creator of FME, the only All-Data, Any-AI Enterprise Integration Platform, through its grants program. Access to the FME platform enabled AWC to streamline the transfer and integration of biodiversity datasets into a central database, which significantly contributed to the delivery of records to the ALA.

“The datasets collected by our team over the past three decades are unique and of national significance,” said Clare Millen, AWC Spatial Ecologist. “Up until now, this incredible bank of information has only been accessible to our ecologists and research teams, however, making it broadly available is critical, particularly for researchers and/or companies doing any sort of landscape assessment.”

“If the biodiversity data records aren’t shared, then people may not know the full of extent of wildlife on the land.”

Peggy Newman, the ALA’s Data Manager, said: “it’s been a pleasure to work with Clare and AWC to build a data mobilisation pathway for their data. AWC properties cover some of the most poorly surveyed areas of Australia, and AWC’s rigorous survey programs provide high-quality data for a host of threatened species. We’re really looking forward to continuing this collaboration for years to come.”

As the largest private owner/manager of land for conservation in Australia, AWC invests in a substantial field ecology program, measuring and reporting on the status and trends of many nationally threatened species populations. AWC has conducted over 930,000 camera trap nights and 550,000 live trap nights since 2010, collecting data from remote regions across the continent, such as the Kimberley, Cape York and the arid zone.

As part of the transfer to the ALA, AWC provided detections of infrequently encountered species such as the Northern Cave Bat, threatened Black-footed Rock-wallaby, Fat-tailed Pseudantechinus, and the first capture of the Scaly-tailed Possum at Bullo River Station in the Northern Territory.

“We’ve provided a lot of high-quality records that significantly increase the data available for various threatened species,” Clare added. “Our surveys have also resulted in long-term datasets for certain species, some over periods of more than 15 years.”

This week’s transfer marks the first injection of data from AWC to the ALA and will be followed up with annual contributions as more records are collected from the field.

“It’s a moving feast,” Clare added. “But we’re setting up an ongoing process so that every year, we’re able to deposit new data to the database and keep the sharing of information going indefinitely.”

For more information on AWC’s wildlife surveys and extensive field program, click here. The ALA is supported by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and hosted by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.

Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) is a pragmatic, on-ground global conservation leader, conserving landscapes and providing hope for Australian wildlife. Informed by science, we deliver measurable conservation impact at scale to secure the future of our most endangered species and their habitats, including restoring degraded landscapes where necessary.

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