The Wallace Initiative was an interactive, web-based mapping tool designed to look at potential refugia for biodiversity under varying levels of climate change, displaying modelling and mapping of approximately 135,000 terrestrial fungi, plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects on a global scale.
All data associated with the system has been retained and is now stored within QRISdata collections and metadata records can be searched for via Research Data JCU, which includes download links for the original web tool software.
If you have further questions or for access to the complete datasets, please send a request to the IT Helpdesk and mention that your question should be forwarded to Research Data.
The Wallace Initiative brings together experts in biodiversity (JCU, UEA), and climate change impacts and adaptation (UEA, JCU), with large datasets on the occurrence of biodiversity (GBIF) and the High Performance Computing Cluster and expertise at JCU to look at the potential impacts of climate change on global terrestrial biodiversity. To date the project has generated 1 petabyte of data. If that petabyte was music it could play continuously for 2000 years, if it was video it would fill 223,000 DVDs or more than 13 years of HD video, if text it would fill 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets. In other words it is a LOT of data on biodiversity and climate change.
The Wallace Initiative was available at the following URLs:
https://wallaceinitiative.org(website)https://wallace.hpc.jcu.edu.au/maps/(mapping tool)
Original content for the application can be accessed at the following URLs:
- https://github.com/jcu-eresearch/wallace-3/ (web mapping tool source code)
- https://github.com/jcu-eresearch/wallaceinitiative.org/ (website source code)
Please note that code and documentation are archived and no longer maintained.
This tool was developed by a team at JCU's eResearch Centre and uses species occurrence data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and climate data from the Tyndall°Centre for Climate Change Research and the Climatic Research Unit. The principal researchers and project advisors were (alphabetically) Dr Erin Graham, Dr Jeff Price, Professor Jeremy VanDerWal and Professor Rachel Warren.
This project has built on earlier work supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative, as well as through the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF).