To set up a BioCollect project you will need an active Atlas of Living Australia user account. Click here for information on creating an ALA account.
To create a project, first go to the hub you would you like your project to appear in - Citizen Science, Ecology or Natural Resource Management. At the menu at very top of the page click on ‘Add your project’. You will then be asked to enter your project information.
All fields marked by a red asterisk are mandatory and must be completed before you can save the project. There is no draft status of the information, but once you’ve completed the mandatory attributes you will be able to come back later and edit it.
Most fields are self-explanatory but below is some additional advice you may field useful when filling out the fields. If you have any queries that are not answered by the information below, please send an email to support@ala.org.au.
Project metadata
The available project types are Citizen Science, Ecology, and National Resource Management. For more information on these project types, click here.
If you would like to use BioCollect for collection or storage of data, you should select yes - this will enable you to add surveys to your project.
For the name of the organisation, you will need to search through the list of organisations already available and select it from there if it already exists. If get to the end of existing organisations and yours is not there, you will need to create it. You can do this by ticking the "My organisation is not in the list box" and then "Register my organisation". If your project is not being run by an organisation, then you can still create it in BioCollect - just use a representative name.
All the fields in the "how can people get involved” section are useful in helping potential participants find your project.
Define the spatial extent of the project area
This information is used to help potential project participants find your project, and by for anyone who is interested in using the data from your project. If your project area is, for example, a council area, a state, or an NRM region, then we may already have your project region defined. To choose from a predefined region, select the last button on the left-hand side of the map. Choose a layer that suits your needs and then select the relevant region.
If you are unable to find your region in the list, you can use the shape tools to manually draw an area on the map.
Map configuration
You can use the map configuration options to choose the map that users will see when creating records in the survey. You have the option to configure both the base map and any overlays for the map.
Note that these options can be overridden by the survey configuration.
Once your project is created you will be able to view it in the relevant project finder. If you’ve configured your project to collect survey data, you can now create a survey and select a survey form.