Australian Biological Resources Study
A programme of Environment Australia
GPO Box 787
Canberra ACT 2601
AUSTRALIA
Facsimile (02) 6250 9555
Web Site http://www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity/abrs
What is the Australian Biological Resources Study?
The Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) is a programme of Environment Australia, part of the Australian Federal Government’s Department of Environment and Heritage.
It was established in 1975 with the mandate to describe the plants and animals of Australia and where they occurred (ie to research and deliver information on the taxonomy and biogeography of Australia’s biota). It was to do this by coordinating the writing of a new Flora of Australia to replace Bentham’s Flora Australiensis of over a century earlier, and to conduct equivalent research and descriptive work on Australia’s fauna. The resources that it had available were a body of full time scientist/editors,
a grants programme to foster taxonomic research in areas that were poorly known, and the goodwill of the Australian and overseas taxonomic community.
For the first 20 years of its existence ABRS concentrated on a small number of core series: the Flora of Australia (‘Flora’ interpreted very broadly to include bryophytes and lichens as well as vascular plants), the Fauna of Australia and the Zoological Catalogue of Australia, all produced in book form. In addition it published a number of supporting handbooks through the Australian Flora & Fauna Handbooks series, including the important baseline works Australian Plant Name Index (APNI -
4 volumes) and the Census of Australian Vascular Plants. To date 27 volumes of Flora of Australia,
5 volumes of Fauna of Australia and 28 volumes of the Zoological Catalogue of Australia have been published.
In the 1990s ABRS began to broaden its range of products. Fungi and algae were removed from the scope of the Flora of Australia project, with agreement to initiate 2 new series: Fungi of Australia
(3 volumes published to date) and the Algae of Australia series (first volume to appear in 2003). ABRS supported the development of new technologies for undertaking and delivering taxonomy, with grants and other support for development of the DELTA suite of descriptive software, the LucID interactive identification software, and the Platypus taxonomic knowledge databasing package.
ABRS was at the forefront of interactive identification key developments, and has sponsored development of a number of interactive keys either directly or indirectly through its grants programme. The last decade has also seen a major increase in publication by ABRS (alone or in partnerships) of handbooks and manuals on various groups of organisms, designed for a wide user base, from scientists to amateur naturalists. Many of these were published through a new book series, the Flora of Australia Supplementary Series.
ABRS’ baseline nomenclatural works have underpinned major advances in Australian taxonomy, with international spinoffs. APNI and the Census of Australian Vascular Plants have been combined in a database to produce an internet version of APNI which is being continually updated. This electronic version of APNI has been linked with the Gray Card Index and Index Kewensis to become the core of a global vascular flora nomenclator, the International Plant Name Index (IPNI). Linked to the APNI activity is the project to provide on-line access to Australia’s herbarium label data and associated information, the Australia’s Virtual Herbarium (AVH) project. This is a joint Federal/State Government and private enterprise project in which ABRS is a partner. The Zoological Catalogue of Australia is being migrated from book form to electronic form and is the basis of ABRS’ Australian Faunal Directory (AFD), an online source of nomenclatural data on Australia’s animals (sens. lat.); the names list in the AFD is expected to form the Master Names List for OZCAM (Online Collections of Australian Museums). The AFD, along with a database version of published Flora of Australia volumes (Flora of Australia Online), indices of fungal, lichen and algal names, a database of recent changes to vascular plant names in Australia (What’s its Name?), and a number of glossaries, together form the Australian Biological Information Facility (ABIF), a rapidly developing online electronic window to ABRS’ taxonomic data. ABIF will eventually provide a major part of Australia’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
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