Atlas of Living Australia - Living Atlases Technical Workshop, March 2025
Introduction
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and Living Atlases (LAs) Technical Workshop took place in Madrid from 11 to 14 March 2025, hosted at the Real Jardín Botánico (CSIC). It marked the first in-person meeting of the technical community since 2020, gathering over 30 participants from 19 institutions across 14 countries.
The idea for this workshop originated during the SPNHC–TDWG 2024 conference, where a dedicated session on “Biodiversity Data, Software and Workflows: Beyond observations, beyond biodiversity (SYM07)” highlighted the importance of renewing collaboration within the ALA–LAs community. As a result, members from Flanders, France, Sweden, and Spain suggested reviving the technical meetings, which had paused during the pandemic.
With parallel streams for developers and managers, the Madrid workshop provided a forum to address technical challenges, explore governance models, and set both short-term solutions and long-term strategies for sustaining the Living Atlases infrastructure.
Workshop Objectives
- Reinforce collaboration among technical teams that use the ALA developed platform.
- Identify shared challenges and opportunities for collective technical development.
- Improve coordination with the ALA central team and clarify governance roles.
- Discuss sustainability strategies for local and shared components
Agenda
The workshop agenda was structured into two parallel streams:
- Developers’ track: installation procedures, spatial portal and interfaces, reuse of GBIF infrastructure, managing sensitive data, identifiers, pipelines, species lists and pages, event-based data, taxonomy, and internationalization.
- Managers’ track: governance and community identity, collaboration with GBIF, EU biodiversity reporting needs, CARE principles and socio-biodiversity data, branding and internationalization, and eDNA workflows.
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Developers |
Managers |
|
March 11, Tuesday |
||
| 9:00 | Welcome, introduction, objectives | |
| 9:30 | ||
| 10:00 | ||
| 10:30 | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 11:00 | 01. Strategies for common LA installation procedures | Long term vision (Consortium, Community of practice) |
| 11:30 | Vicente Ruiz | |
| 12:00 | ||
| 12:30 | Lunch break | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | ||
| 13:30 | Tour to the garden | |
| 14:00 | ||
| 14:30 | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 15:00 | 02. Spatial portal & spatial interfaces | GBIF collaboration |
| 15:30 | Rasa Bukontaite | |
| 16:00 | ||
| 16:30 | 03. Reuse of the GBIF infrastructure as in: Registry, GRSciColl, Collectory | Managers are invited to participate in the developers' session |
| 17:00 | Tim Robertson | |
| 17:30 | ||
| 18:00 | ||
Developers |
Managers |
|
March 12, Wednesday |
||
| 9:00 | 04. Managing sensitive data | Regional focus needs (such as for EU and Annex II, Natura 2000 uniformization, invasive EU species), region-specific taxonomy |
| 9:30 | Alice Ainsa | |
| 10:00 | ||
| 10:30 | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 11:00 | 05. Code documentation, issue management: Intro - Part 2 | Adaptation to CARE principles, new tracking systems for local community data, new extensions for socio-biodiversity data, and new ways for integration with GenBank in BIE |
| 11:15 | Vicente Ruiz | |
| 11:30 | ||
| 11:45 | 06. Identifiers sharing between ALA and GBIF | |
| 12:00 | ||
| 12:15 | Tim Robertson / Joe Lipson | |
| 12:30 | Lunch break | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | ||
| 13:30 | 07. Pipelines adoption and thresholds - Vicente Ruiz | Branding & internationalization |
| 14:00 | 08. Reuse of the GBIF infrastructure as in: occurrence processing - Dave Martin | |
| 14:30 | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 15:00 | 09. Species list handling & management | eDNA datasets index in LA platforms |
| 15:30 | Stefan Van Dyck | |
| 16:00 | 10. Species pages | |
| 16:30 | Francisco Pando | |
| 17:00 | ||
Developers |
Managers |
|
March 13, Thursday |
||
| 9:00 | 11. Event base data handling | LAs community governance |
| 9:30 | Dimitri Bosens | |
| 10:00 | ||
| 10:30 | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 11:00 | 12. Taxon oriented: checklistbank, use of different taxonomies and Catalogue of Life | |
| 11:30 | Dave Martin | |
| 12:00 | ||
| 12:30 | Lunch break | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | ||
| 13:30 | 13. Internationalization - Vicente Ruiz | |
| 13:45 | Unconference time | |
| 14:30 | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 15:00 | Final discussion and conclusions | |
| 15:30 | ||
| 16:00 | ||
| 16:30 | ||
| 17:00 | ||
Bonding Day
The final day included a bonding excursion to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, offering participants the chance to strengthen personal connections and reflect on workshop outcomes in an informal setting.