Occurrence dataset Registered November 16, 2018

    Conservation Atlas Surveys

    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

    Geographic scope

    Description

    Continental Australia

    Latitude
    From -55 to -10
    Longitude
    From 112 to 155

    Temporal scope

    range
    January 01, 1879 - December 31, 1989

    Methodology

    Quality control

    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.

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

    Metrics

    Additional info

    None

    Contacts

    • Conservation Atlas Surveys

      Originator
      Metadata author
      Organization
      Conservation Atlas Surveys
      Roles
      Originator
      Metadata author
    • Atlas of Living Australia

      Distributor
      Administrative point of contact
      Organization
      Atlas of Living Australia
      Address
      CSIRO Ecosystems Services
      Roles
      Distributor
      Administrative point of contact
      Email

    GBIF registration

    Registration date
    November 16, 2018
    Metadata last modified
    August 08, 2025
    Publication date
    October 06, 2021
    Hosted by
    Atlas of Living Australia
    Installation
    ALA.org.au
    Endpoints
    Darwin Core Archive
    Preferred identifier
    10.15468/yoxxna
    Alternative identifiers
    DOI10.5063/f1qc01qk

    Citation

    The University of Queensland (2021). Conservation Atlas Surveys. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/yoxxna accessed via GBIF.org on 2025-08-15.