No abstract

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is Australia’s national biodiversity database, delivering data and related services to more than 80,000 Australian and international users annually. Established under the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy to provide trusted biodiversity data to support the research sector, its utility now extends to government, higher education, non-government organisations and community groups. These partners provide data to the ALA and leverage its data and related services. The ALA has also played an important leadership role internationally in the biodiversity informatics and infrastructure space, both through its partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and through support for the international Living Atlases programmes which has now delivered 24 instances of ALA software to deliver sovereign biodiversity data capability around the world. This paper begins with a historical overview of the genesis of the ALA from the collections, museums and herbaria community in Australia. It details the biodiversity and related data and services delivered to users with a primary focus on species occurrence records which represent the ALA's primary data type. Finally, the paper explores the ALA's future directions by referencing results from a recently completed national consultation process.

The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information. In the present article, we propose a new interconnected network of digital objects on the Internet—the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) network—that transcends existing aggregator technology, augments the DES with third-party data through machine algorithms, and provides a platform for more efficient research and robust interdisciplinary discovery.

The foregut in malacostracan crustaceans is an ectodermally derived structure that shows morphological variation among taxa. Foregut morphology was studied in a syncarid, Anaspides tasmaniae, with the dual aims of describing the structure and of elucidating similarities and differences between A. tasmaniae and other malacostracans. The feeding habits of A. tasmaniae were also studied to correlate structure and function. The feeding strategy adopted by A. tasmaniae, predominantly detritivory, but preying occasionally on large food items, may be influenced by constraints of the morphology of the foregut. Scanning electron microscopy and conventional histological techniques revealed that the foregut of A. tasmaniae lacks ossicles and that internal skeletal elements are fashioned from invaginations of the external wall. These internal elements, which direct food particles and act as sieves, are densely setose. There is no evidence of calcification nor of the ossicles that characterize many decapod foreguts. The musculature is simple and acts principally to squeeze the entire foregut rather than to cause discrete movements of individual skeletal elements. The foregut of A. tasmaniae is not easily compared to the highly modified foreguts of decapods, but it shows many similarities to the foreguts of nondecapod taxa.The foregut of malacostracan crustaceans has been investigated anatomically in many taxa, but only recently have authors begun to correlate structure, function, and evolutionary constraints. Comparison of foregut structure and operation in related taxa can provide insights into evolution, and may be useful in taxonomy, in a similar way as comparison of external features. Here, feeding behavior and foregut morphology of a representative of a little-studied group of malacostracans, the Syncarida, is described and compared with those of other malacostracans.Anaspides tasmaniae Thompson, 1893, is the largest representative of the Syncarida. The syncarids are potentially a pivotal group in studying malacostracan evolution, because of their many undifferentiated or "primitive" traits, such as their lack of a carapace and their nearly complete segmentation. Despite their potential in evolutionary and comparative investigations, they are a poorly studied group, because many syncarids are interstitial or cave dwellers and the largest members that live above ground are found only in Tasmania, Australia. Moreover, since this animal, A. tasmaniae, is found only in alpine and subalpine mountain streams and tarns, it is relatively inaccessible even in its natural environment.There have been numerous studies of the morphology of the foregut in malacostracans. Two distinct foregut types are recognized, the "isopod type" and the "decapod type." These share basic similarities but differ in many respects (Ullrich et al., 1991 ). Workers in the field have tended to segregate themselves into two groups based on the type of foregut studied. This has led to two relatively separate bodies of literature concerning the foreg...