In the light of ever mounting demands on the World's land and water resources, the rapid assessment of biodiversity has become an incresingly acute problem.

This project aims to assist the World Bank's client countries in their response to the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Participatory nations agreed in principle to conserve and use in a sustainable fashion those components of biological diversity under their jurisdiction.

In 1993 the World Bank commissioned CRES, CSIRO, the Environmental Resources Information Network and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to assemble BioRAP tools developed by these institutions for rapid assessment of biodiversity. The goal was established that a reliable assessment of the biodiversity of a country or region should be able to be produced within one year.

The tools developed by CRES for modelling the spatial distributions of environmental or `abiotic' data, played a critical role in this project. The ANUDEM and ANUSPLIN spatial interpolation techniques, developed by Dr Michael Hutchinson, can generate spatial distributions of terrain and climate, using data from existing topographic maps and climate networks, with predictive errors approaching that of actual observation and measurement.

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The climate and terrain generated by ANUDEM and ANUSPLIN, in conjunction with the BIOCLIM package developed by Professor Henry Nix and Ms June McMahon, can be used as the basis for rapidly stratifying, or classifying, the landscape into regions for the purposes of assessing biodiversity, designing further biological survey and of land allocation and management.

The classification tool is the PATN package developed by Dr Lee Belbin of the CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology. Further tools for selecting priority areas for conservation of biodiversity were also provided by CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology.

The BIOCLIM program is part of the ANUCLIM package maintained at CRES. BIOCLIM uses the terrain and climate distributions generated by ANUDEM and ANUSPLIN to predict spatial distributions of flora and fauna species based on point location records. The spatial predictions (or maps) are based on identifying those regions which have a climate which matches the climate at the point species locations. Taken together, these environmental and biological spatial modelling tools have underpinned many of the environmental and resource assessments for Australia conducted at CRES.

The BioRAP tools are currently being used to assemble and analyse biodiversity data for Papua New Guinea. Collaborating institutions for the PNG project are CRES, CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology, the Australian National Herbarium (ANH) and the Department of Environment and Conservation of Papua New Guinea (DEC).