The Living Atlases community in action: the NBN Atlas Spatial Portal and “Explore Your Region” module

Abstract

Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) (https://www.ala.org.au/) is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node of Australia. Since 2010, they have developed and improved a platform for sharing and exploring biodiversity information. All the modules are publicly available for reuse and customization on their GitHub account (https://github.com/AtlasOfLivingAustralia). The National Biodiversity Network, a registered charity, is the UK GBIF node and has been sharing biodiversity data since 2000. They published more than 79 million occurrences from 818 datasets. In 2016, they launched the NBN Atlas Scotland (https://scotland.nbnatlas.org/) based on the Atlas of Living Australia infrastructure. Since then, they released the NBN Atlas (https://nbnatlas.org/), the NBN Atlas Wales (https://wales.nbnatlas.org/) and soon the NBN Atlas Isle of Man. In addition to the occurrence/species search engine and the metadata registry, they put in place several tools that help users to work with data published in the network: the spatial portal and "explore your region" module. Both elements are based on Atlas of Living Australia developments. Because the Atlas of Living Australia platform is really powerful an reusable, we want to show you these two applications used to make geographical analyses. In order to perform this, we will present you the specificities of each component by giving examples of some functionalities.