The Australian National Species List steps up for biodiversity conservation

The Australian National Species List (AuNSL) will bring together authoritative national taxonomies and supporting nomenclatural data for flora, fauna, fungi and algae. These data enable biodiversity infrastructures, such as the Atlas of Living Australia, to store information about taxa against a standard, permanently resolvable taxonomy, and to create linkages between them. The Biodiversity Data Repository (BDR) is a new Australian government infrastructure supporting environmental assessments under Australia's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The BDR will bring together biodiversity data assets from a range of sources and enable decision making to be based on a more holistic view of taxa in Australia. To achieve its objectives, the BDR requires the ability to align disparate taxonomies to a national standard. To support the BDR we have restructured and consolidated the constituent datasets of the AuNSL and added a GraphQL interface from which we can provide machine access to the full suite of taxonomic and nomenclatural entities in the data and the linkages between them. Currently we provide a simple name check service for aligning supplied names with the standard AuNSL taxonomy and a full taxonomic backbone extract as a SKOS concept scheme expressed in JSON-LD. We are working towards an expanded set of taxonomic and nomenclatural services and a more generalised and complete graph of the AuNSL taxonomy, which can serve an increasing number of initiatives including the Australian Traits database (AusTraits), the Australian National DNA Library, and sensitive species data exchange mechanisms.