What’s the names index?

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) names index is a taxonomic backbone that underpins almost all of the ALA’s systems, providing a checklist of Australian species that references authoritative sources, particularly the National Species List, so that we can match, process and aggregate species records.

What’s changing? 

The ALA team has been working for the past eighteen months on refinements to our taxonomic backbone and the way it is structured. The new index, available next week, will be current as at May 2025. The principal source is the National Species List (NSL). We supplement this with the Catalogue of Life (CoL), and the New Zealand Organisms Register (NZOR). We have comprehensively reviewed all records that have previously not matched the taxonomy and there will be an increase in the number of records correctly matching to species. 

We have been reviewing all sources including all major government lists (state lists, threatened, sensitive and biosecurity) to ensure they match, reducing variations to under 2%. This will improve accuracy and navigation when users are searching for new species or threatened species records

How long will it take?

We are starting work on this change on Friday 5 December at 3pm AEDT and expect it to be done by Monday 8 December 2025.

What can I expect to happen during the change?

We recommend delaying running species-based occurrence searches and working with species lists until after the change is complete. New downloads of occurrence records are unavailable until this is complete.