Australian Biodiversity Information Facility

Welcome to the Australian Biodiversity Information Facility (ABIF), the Australian node for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), proudly supported by the Australian Government.

A new GBIF Data Portal has been launched in Paris on the 2nd July 2007 as part of the twelfth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of Parties' Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Features of the new GBIF Data Portal include:

• Advanced search functions
• Friendly user interface
• Improved mapping speed
• Links to images
• Web services

The press release issued by GBIF on the launch of the Data Portal can be found at http://www.gbif.org/Stories/STORY1183131151.

ABIF is a collaborative project of the Australian biological research community to provide readily accessible information on the biodiversity of our megadiverse continent, its surrounding oceans and external territories including, amongst others, the Australian Antarctic Territory. ABIF is coordinated and hosted by the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS), a program within the Australian Government's Department of the Environment and Water Resources.

As the Australian node, our role is to provide a portal to document and coordinate the activities of Australian GBIF participants. It is developing a data portal that provides access to checklists of species names and allows searching for specimens and observations held in the biological collections of ABIF participants.