South Australian Museum Marine Invertebrates collection

The Marine invertebrates collection is currently represented by 23 phyla and holds more than one million specimen lots including 1,700 holotypes, 11,300 secondary types, 33,000 registered lots and 1,400 microscope slide preparations. Specimens include molluscs, crustaceans, worms, sponges, jellyfish, corals and sea anemones, sea stars and sea urchins.

Of these specimens about 5,500 have been databased and are accessible through the Atlas of Living Australia, more than 1500 of them with digital images of the specimen and label.

The SA Museum manages this dataset using the KE EMu collection management system. It is interpreted into the Darwin Core metadata schema (DwC) and semi-regularly exported to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums (OZCAM).

Data sourced from Australian museums on both the ALA and OZCAM should be identical, but on ALA they are combined with observational data from citizen science initiatives and other sources. Both of those sites make it possible to combine, interrogate and analyse data through web services such as the Spatial Analysis Portal. In the Spatial Portal ALA data can be combined with meteorological and other environmental data sourced from and made accessible by relevant government agencies.

The ALA also has a fully documented API

The Museum has also been using the ALA's Online Volunteer Digitisation Portal, DIGIVOL to digitise the data for Marine Invertebrate specimens. To facilitate this a large quantity of specimens have been imaged.

Data about endangered species are either withheld from online publication, or coordinates or other data are obscured on the ALA and OZCAM. In those circumstances more specific information is available directly from SA Museum collection managers if it is genuinely required for research purposes.

SA Museum data can be downloaded in full from the Atlas of Living Australia, or broken down into discipline specific parts (e.g. Herpetology, Mammalogy etc). On download the ALA will request an email address (not mandatory) and a reason for download (mandatory) – this is required to track usage of the ALA data to help data providers determine priorities for upload and improvement.