How often does data get updated to Atlas of Living Australia?

General
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I have heard/read several times that Research Grade observations will automatically be added to Atlas of Living Australia. Is it really that automatic? Are there other conditions to it? How often does the data get refreshed?

I have some observations that became research grade a few days ago, but they are not showing on ALA. When should I expect to see them there? Or am I using the wrong search parameters to find it?

Also, I couldn’t find any information about this feature in the official pages. If I’ve missed it, can you please link it in your response so that others who are searching for it can also find it? Thanks!

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I believe iNaturalist prepares an archive of all Australian observations once per week for ALA to harvest, and ALA may do some additional updates in between using the iNaturalist API. @peggydnew from ALA can explain more about their systems, since iNaturalist doesn’t directly manage the data use by other platforms, we just facilitate it.

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I also found this information on the ALA website, along with some fascinating data about how much of the iNat data is used there! https://collections.ala.org.au/public/show/dr1411

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It sounds like this is also relevant, although I’m not entirely clear yet what GBIF is: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#GBIFdata

“Research-grade observations with CC0, CC BY, or CC-BY NC licenses. iNaturalist generates data for GBIF once a week, and we believe they import it once a week.”

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Hi, the Atlas of Living Australia picks up data every week. We had some technical hiccups last week and no data came through - this has now been resolved, so do check to see if yours have come through. Here’s a link to your observations in the ALA: https://biocache.ala.org.au/occurrences/search?q=data_resource_uid:dr1411&fq=alau_user_id:row_nature&sort=occurrence_date&dir=desc

We actually bring all Verifiable observations across, not just Research Grade. We have some information about the relationship between iNaturalist and the ALA in our Knowledge Base:

https://support.ala.org.au/support/solutions/folders/6000236125

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Thanks very much Peggy! So exciting to see my records on ALA. :-)

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a couple of somewhat related things:

first, does anyone know how / when the links back to the ALA occurrence records get populated on the iNaturalist observation records?

i was looking at platypus records in ALA that came from iNaturalist (https://biocache.ala.org.au/occurrences/search?q=data_resource_uid:dr1411&fq=species_group:"Mammals"&fq=common_name:"Platypus"&pageSize=100), and it looks like only some of the related iNaturalist observation records have links back to the occurrence records in ALA.

for example:

i was thinking about this because it likes like the process that populates links GBIF occurrence records had been delayed for a few months (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-long-does-it-take-for-gbif-outlinks-to-show-up-on-observations/12890). i wonder if something strange could also be going on with the process that populates the ALA links?

the second thing:

this page (https://support.ala.org.au/support/solutions/articles/6000223721-how-is-data-harvested-from-inaturalist-and-fed-into-the-ala-) says:

Observations will come across to the ALA if they are:

  • Shareable under a Creative Commons license
  • In Australia
  • Verifiable observations - those which are marked Needs ID or Research Grade

this observation that appears to have all rights reserved has made it over to ALA:
iNat record: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/47090486
ALA record: https://biocache.ala.org.au/occurrences/56a8fdc2-d9a7-4434-9c7a-153bbe822799

so is there something that supersedes the “Shareable under a Creative Commons license” criterion?

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Thanks for this @pisum. I can’t answer for the links back to the ALA, because it’s driven from iNaturalist end, but I would say that the process is probably infrequent similarly to the GBIF process.
As for the all rights reserved record, you’re right to point that out. I’ll try to see why that record is making it through to the ALA because it shouldn’t be.

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