About The APSA Website

The Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas website is designed to enable simple online access to the largest collection of pollen and spores information in the Australasian region. The APSA collection and office is currently located at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. In the future we plan to expand the collection to incorporate a federated system of data acquisition from contributors around the Asia/Pacific region.

Using the APSA website

To make the APSA collection available to the widest range of people we have created a searchable database that is freely accessible over the web and suitable for use by professional as well as the amateur person interested in pollen and spore identification.

The Atlas is a flexible and powerful knowledge management tool applicable to research development by a wide range of users—particularly those within palynology, palaeoecology, archaeology, biology, geology, and the airborne allergy fields. Through an open and free exchange of information we hope to encourage greater collaboration among researchers across a wide range of research areas, creating the potential for new and innovative research.

Image capturing on Zeiss AxioImager
microscope enables rapid acquisition
and morphological analysis of pollen.

APSA pollen and spore taxa are collected
from a wide range of locations in the
Asia/Pacific region.

Contributions Always Welcome

The APSA team will gladly accept contributions from other reference collections. We can provide a predesigned FileMaker Pro database template that is compatible with the APSA metadata standards. Data entered in these FileMaker databases can then be ingested through the automated APSA data checking and conversion procedures. After this ingest process has completed the data is added to the project relational database (PostgreSQL) where it can be browsed and searched on this website.

Project documentation

Here's a downloadable document (in Word format) that describes the project in more details: APSA user document, and here's a downloadable FileMaker Pro database template (in zipped file form) that you can use for collecting pollen and spore data: APSA FileMaker Pro template.

Pollen and Spore Reference Collections

For more background and history on pollen and spore reference collections in Australasia please see the APSA collections history page page.

Image not available yet?

If we don't have any images for the species you are interested in then please contact us and we will do our best to add a description and image to the collection as soon as possible.

Citing The Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas

If you would like to cite the atlas in publications, use this format:
APSA Members* (2007) The Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas V1.0. Australian National University, Canberra. http://apsa.anu.edu.au/ *See members listed in the About page.

If you would like to cite the APSA user document referred to above, use this format:
Rowe, C . (2006) The Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas User Document. PalaeoWorks: Australian National University Technical Report 8. p.30.

The APSA Team

A number of people at the Australian National University have contributed to the APSA project during the period 2005-2007: Dr Simon Haberle, Dr Cassandra Rowe, Stuart Hungerford, Paul Warren, Prof Geoff Hope, Feli Hopf, Andrew Thornhill, Iona Flett, Dr Janelle Stevenson, Pia Atahan (UWA Intern), Xun Li (Uni Auckland intern). In addition staff from other universities have contributed to the development of the APSA:

Dr Chengyu Weng, Tongji University, China
Dr Peter Shimeld, University of Tasmania
Dr Sander Van Der Kaars, Monash University

Acknowledgements

The APSA project is funded through the ARC e-Research Scheme and the Department of Archaeology and Natural History, College of Asia and Pacific, ANU. The collection is curated within the PalaeoWorks Laboratory in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History. The APSA website and database is hosted at the ANU Supercomputer Facility.