ANHAT – Australian National Heritage Assessment Tool

An analysis and assessment tool for Australian plant and animal species. ANHAT enables the comparative heritage value of different places.

Description

ANHAT is a tool that assists in the comparative analysis of heritage attributes such as species richness and distribution across bioregions.1

ANHAT is designed to perform basic comparative analyses on the presence or absence of taxa across multiple genera, families or orders. It displays the result in a geographic information system (ArcGIS) as a simple shaded map of Australia2 where each grid cell represents a 10km x 10km area.

This is a specialised tool that has components of interest to the ALA

• Species names management – endorsed names, synonyms, misspellings, truncation
• Species phylogeny using hierarchies downloaded from AFD - Australian Faunal Directory and APNI - Australian Plant Names Index.

ANHAT has been developed by the National Heritage Assessment section of the Australian Department of Environment, Water, heritage and the Arts. They are open to sharing tools with the ALA.

Function

• Data cleaning and manipulation
• Data cleaning – spelling, misnaming
• Data validating – taxonomy, geography
• Analysis tools
• Simple – distribution
• Taxonomy
• Identification tools, keys
• User interface
• Personal use
• Raw data and visual presentation

Why use this tool?

• Analysis of species distributions

Who will use this tool?

• Data creation
• Experts - taxonomy
• Data capture
• Curators – specimens
• Data providers
• Institutions
• Private collections
• Data users
• Expert
• Interest groups
• General public
• ALA infrastructure

How will the tool be used?

• Desktop application
• Microsoft Access, ArcGIS (for mapping)
• ANHAT is a large application that could be broken into separate tools for incorporating into the ALA – eg names management
• User input is required
• Many of the processes can be run as batch jobs.

Where in the data chain could this tool be used?

• Data source
• ALA central
• User’s machine
• Pathways between these

When could this tool be used?

• Before data is made available to ALA
• While data is stored with ALA
• At the time of a user request

Availability

• Contact: Dan Rosauer Dan.Rosauer@environment.gov.au, Australian Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts
• Access to this in-house program is subject to negotiation with the Australian Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts
• Further development will be required to adapt parts of this tool to the ALA

Comments

• Requires development for incorporating into ALA
• The Australian Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts are open to the concept of the ALA making use of some of their software tools.
• The species lists are incomplete. Some taxonomies are not included :
• ANHAT doesn’t include every plant – currently 13 orders, 80 families
• Includes all vertebrates
• Includes chosen invertebrates
• 10km x 10km analysis squares allows for very simple spatial queries