Insects have always been a challenge to identify because of their extremely high diversity. We estimate there are approximately 200,000 species of insects in Australia, and these are placed in about 640 families and 24–26 orders. By utilising modern identification tools, this project aims to facilitate the identification of Australian insects.

While the project's intellectual roots are in the dichotomous, paper-based keys to order and family found in CSIRO’s Insects of Australia (2nd Edition 1991), the goal is to update those keys, and wherever possible, use modern computer-based identification tools, whether they be dichotomous or matrix keys.

The project provides a stable web environment and clearing house for keys to any hierarchical level. While we have begun with keys to the Orders and families within each order, there is scope to attach or add keys to genera and species, and we have provided these where they are available (for example Diptera: Tabanidae).

Audience

The keys are aimed at an advanced undergraduate or early postgraduate level, although we hope that the key to orders is accessable even to less experienced users. John Trueman and undergraduate students at the Australian National University have road tested keys and developed some keys as part of 3rd year projects.

Funding and resources

The building blocks of the project were enabled by the Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility Taxonomic Research and Information Facility (2007–2010) by funding the conversion of existing keys to family for the web, and the development of some keys from scratch.

The interactive keys on the site are built with Lucid3 and deployed using the Lucid Key Server available at Lucidcentral.org.

CSIRO matching funds for the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) has allowed us to source and digitise many of the images of insects in the keys. The information in the family fact sheets has been stored in BioLink so that it can be used elsewhere on the web, such as in the ALA. Keys to the families of Diptera and Hymenoptera, recently published on CD ROM from projects funded by the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS), form the nucleus of the project.

We are grateful to our collaborators from around Australia and the world who have provided interactive keys, or allowed us to link to other web identification resources.