AUSTRALIA—GERMANY WORKSHOP ON BIODIVERSITY

The Shine Dome, 13-17 March 2006

Biodiversity data for environmental policy
by Mr Peter Cochrane, Director of National Parks, Department of the Environment and Heritage (DEH)

The role of the Federal Department of the Environment and Heritage is to advise the Australian Government on matters of environment and heritage, particularly a select suite that are regarded as being of national significance. It administers some large funding programs and advises on and represents the Government in international agreements.

Biodiversity — its conservation and the understanding of it — needs to be tackled on a local, national and global basis, and the Government is actively engaged at each of these levels. Australia is responsible for about 8 to 10 per cent of biodiversity on the planet, much of which, particularly at the micro-organism level, is not well understood or not described, and these gaps pose huge challenges.

The Government supports the compilation of, and releases, a State of the Environment report every five years. The department assists with the provision of information essential for dealing with the legal issues that the Government is responsible for, such as environmental approvals and assessments. The Environmental Resource Information Network, which is part of the department, manages and provides this information for government agencies, research institutions and others. Apart from the collaborative collection and provision of information, there is growing use by the Australian Government of satellite data and remote sensing.

Under the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation, Australia has been divided into some 85 bio-regions and more than 400 subregions. These help in the reporting of the protection of native ecosystems and how government programs are progressing, as well as helping with continent-wide assessments of landscape health. This is also used for setting priorities for the National Reserve System — that is, those parts of Australia that are set aside to protect biodiversity — and there is a strategic framework that draws on these regionalisations to identify priorities for government funding.

The Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research is a joint venture between the Australian National Botanic Gardens and CSIRO. It plays a strong role in improving Australia’s understanding of and capacity to manage plant biodiversity.

The Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) was set up some 33 years ago and has been supporting the documentation of Australia’s biodiversity, initially through publishing information such as the Flora of Australia and Fauna of Australia series, and in recent years online. There are many Web-based tools that the department is developing, such as Australia’s Virtual Herbarium, which is trying to create public access to the six million herbaria specimens that are held in government herbaria around Australia. The same approach has been taken with museum collection data. ABRS hosts the Australian end of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.