South Australian Museum Terrestrial Invertebrate Collection

The collection has Australia-wide and Indo-Pacific representation, plus some world specimens for comparative purposes. The collection comprises 1200000 pinned specimens, 450000 specimens in spirit and 20000 slides. There are 8670 holotypes, of which 5000 are from the A.M. Lea beetle collection. There are 23000 other types. In summary, the entomological collections Class Insecta comprise 662 Australian families and 85,961 known Australian species. The arachnological collections comprise spiders (50000 specimens in alcohol), mites (25000 slide mounts and 20000 specimens in alcohol), scorpions (5000 specimens in alcohol) and myriapods. Images from this collection are available on the Atlas of Living Australia.

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

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.