NSW BioNet's Open Application Programming Interface allows organisations and individuals to directly integrate biodiversity data into their software systems.
The BioNet Web Service upgrade was completed successfully. However, fails may still occur if the volume of users exceeds system capacity. Please consider running large queries after-hours and let us know the details if your query fails.
SpeciesSightings_CoreData data will be refreshed weekly on Sunday mornings.
Our apologies for this further inconvenience. Watch this space for further updates.
The Open Application Programming Interface (API) is part of a NSW Government Open Government initiative and it unlocks the innovation potential of the valuable BioNet data asset.
By delivering this data from an Open API we are aiming to improve environmental decision making by integrating up to date, consistent and reliable biodiversity data in planning and decision-making systems.
Release 3.3 of the API makes the following BioNet data collections available:
It also includes a thesaurus service for IT developers to enhance search functionality in software apps.
For more detailed information about the capabilities and features of the API read the Release Notes:
Data is shared according to published standards which provide information on the field names, definitions, formats and any restrictions that might apply to specific fields:
*Note the Vegetation Map Data Standard relates to data that will be delivered through the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) and OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), rather than OData.
Step 1: To help you get started and issue you an application token, please download and complete the Data Use Case Form and email it to BioNet. While this step is not mandatory, it will enable us to better support your development efforts.
Step 2: Read the Developer Guide to understand how we have implemented OData for BioNet Web Services and follow our best practice guidelines.
To help reduce the development work needed to integrate the data, we chose an open global API standard (OASIS OData Version 4.0). There are many existing online OData communities and resources for developers and we recommend you search the internet to see if there are existing resources for your development tools and platform.
To help you get started, here are some links to core resources:
The data made available through web services are the same data that are currently available through the BioNet web applications.
Unless you have a specific need that is not currently met by our web application, we recommend you access the data using the BioNet Atlas or the BioNet Vegetation Classification user interfaces.
If you have a need to create customised downloads, there are a number of desktop applications that support our API which is based on the Open Data Protocol (OData) version 4.0. A list of some of the tools available can be found at: OData.org Ecosystem.
Quick guide for users of Excel 2010 or later versions:
The BioNet team has prepared a series of power queries relating to frequently accessed BioNet data. They are available from the NSW BioNet resources web page.
Open the ‘Power queries’ subheadings under relevant data collections to download these refreshable power queries.