Quail
Date: Jun 26, 2026 Version: 1.0.0
Quail is a downloadable plugin for QGIS that gives registered users access to biodiversity data hosted by the ‘living atlases’. The ‘living atlases’ are a set of organisations that share a common codebase, and act as nodes of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). These organisations collate and store observations of individual life forms, using the ‘Darwin Core’ data standard. The Quail was built and is maintained by Amanda Buyan, a member of the Science & Decision Support Team at the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).
The Quail enables users to locate and download species occurrence records (observations, specimens, eDNA records, etc.), and to restrict their queries to particular taxa or locations. Users can also restrict their queries based on threatened and sensitive species lists, or restrict their results to occurrences that meet particular data-quality criteria. This data is then read into QGIS as a vector layer.
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