For the past couple of weeks, I have been working on an exciting project: creating an expedition (I don’t know about you, but that word always fills me with joy) for the Atlas of Living Australia website. What’s Atlas of Living Australia, you say? Well, friends, I’m here to tell you all about it.
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA, for short) is a website that makes biodiversity data available to the public. It started in Australia (in case you couldn’t tell), and currently primarily focuses on Australian flora and fauna, but there are more records being added from around the globe every day.
The way it works is that institutions create these “expeditions” that consist of images of either: a) labeled plant or animal specimens from that institution’s collection or b) field notes. Then, volunteers go in and transcribe the information from the images. The transcribed information is then sent to the institution that the expedition belongs to, and it is also (after some quality assurance checks) uploaded to the ALA Atlas, where it is available to the public.
The data provided by the ALA can be utilized by the general public and also by scientific institutions looking for information on biodiversity, environmental changes, mapping species occurrences, etc.. In short, this is an amazing service that is being provided to the public, thanks to the ALA, the participating institutions, and (of course) the volunteers!
Now, the first ALA expedition from The Frost is entitled “First Beatty Mexican Odonata Collecting Expedition, 1957”. It is a collection of 798 images of both dragonflies and damselflies that were collected by (guess who?) the Beattys during (guess what?) their first collecting trip to Mexico in 1957.
The expedition is all up and ready to go, and we are ready to receive some transcribed data! All we need is a little help from our friends (that’s you!). Here are the steps you will need to take to assist us with this little project:
1. Go to the ALA site: http://www.ala.org.au/
2. Click on the big, red “Get Involved” button on the right side of the screen.
3. Click on the big, red “Volunteer Portal” button on the right side of the screen.
4. Click the big, red “Register” button on the left side of the screen.
5. Follow the steps to register.
6. Click on the blue “Expeditions” button found on the menu at the top of the screen.
7. Find our project and click on it!
8. On this page, you will find a link to a tutorial that will help you with transcription. You can look at this first, or refer back to it, if you have questions later (there are also help bubbles next to most of the fields, which are quite useful).
9. Once you’re ready, hit the big, red “Start transcribing” button and get to it!
As a volunteer, not only will you get to assist in the noble task of providing Mexican Odonata biodiversity information to the public, but, as an added bonus, the person who transcribes the most labels gets the prestigious title on the expedition page of “Expedition Leader”. Pret-ty sweet.