Diversity in Mallacoota - as revealed by the Atlas of Living Australia

Stimulated by a Facebook post about diversity in the Mallacoota area I have extracted some of the records for the area held in the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).  What follows is a very summary analysis of those records.

For simplicity and as a starting point I used the "Explore Your Area" function in ALA, seeking information for a 5km area around our house.  The Atlas gives a nice map of the area with reportoing sites marked in it.

 I downloaded the file of records.  This was quite large (~5Mb in a zip file, expanding to an EXCEL file of some 39Mb when unzipped).  As it contains 57,008 records that isn't surprising.  I cut out quite a few columns as being things of no interest to me and got the file down to 10 Mb which I uploaded to ACCESS.

My first attempt was to look at the number of records by Class (equivalent to birds, reptiles etc.) That got messy as the plant taxonomists have made a completely confusing mess of their element at the class level  However there was a helpful summary on the ALA page.

Those headings are pretty useful for a layman. 

I have then tried to calculate the number of records rather than the number of species.

In what follows I have highlighted the problems I have encountered in doing so.  I stress that these were not fatal to my project: I just had to do a bit of work.  The ALA in particular were very helpful with this.

Calculating number of records by species group.

This turned out to be "interesting" since the download file doesn't contain these species groups and I couldn't work out how to get the equivalents in all cases:

• Some were easy to line up (eg Birds = Class Aves);
• Some were going to be difficult (eg Crustacea is a mixture of classes; splitting plants into monocots etc); and 
• I'd never heard of Chromista!  (It emerges this is a new(ish Kingdom essentially of photosynthetic algae.  Reading the wiki about this species group illustrates the problem of stability at the cutting edge of science.)

With assistance from the Atlas staff I managed to get a concordance worked out.

There were also a few other issues

• The totals shown in that table do not in all cases equal the sum of the (cited) totals (eg Athropods doesn't equal the sum of Crustaceans and Insects - I think the difference is spiders).  Again I have been able to sort this out;
• Some groups, with small numbers of species and/or records were not listed above.  They are few in number and include groups such as polychaete worms - ie the hairy things one digs up for bait - cephalopods (eg squid and octopus) and jellyfish. I have grouped them together as as "other marine invertebrates".
• Not all records in the ALA have a complete taxonomic tree, and as a result of my consequent actions my totals differ from those offered by the Atlas.  No biggie, but this must be noted if comparing the table above with what follows:
• In some cases taxa are only identified to order, family or genus.  For my purposes I wanted species so deleted the incomplete records.
• In other cases what looked like "Good" species didn't have the higher levels.  This mainly seemed to flow from the personality conflicts evident in orchid taxonomy. As I was able to work out which species group the records related to I have included them.

Results

At the most summary level I have recognised 7 groups

 For a little more detail these 22 groups illustrate the number of species (a good measure of diversity) and the number of records (a measure of observer effort).

Discussion

I see it as rather remarkable that within 5 kms of our house 1,972 species of living entities have been recorded.  From my major personal interests 297 species of birds in such a small area, in a temperate climate, is almost beyond belief.

As we are now living here I shall be trying my best to identify and record in the Atlas species of groups other than birds.  This might get a large kick along when members of the Australian Native plants Society come on a field trip later in the year.

As well as these big picture numbers I have also got a lot of material to form the basis of field lists for plants, fungi and insects.  Personally I always find it helpful to have a list of possibles as a starting point: that gives things to look for in field guides and reference materials.  If anyone else wants a copy of my lists I'm happy to send them.

As well as the lists of species the Atlas also includes details of the locations where records were made.  In total there are ~1500 locations listed: this is an artefact of

• people defining locality names as they choose; and
• databases being databases and regarding trivial differences in naming (eg Smiths is different to Smith's) as relating to different places.  By way of example in an initial scan of the localities I have found 9 "different" names all clearly  referring to the Mallacoota Recycled Water Plant!

It is significant that 795 of the locations have only a single record!  Only 49 locations have more than 100 records!  I shall try to work out something that identifies the true hotspots for various species groups.