SPRAT Modernisation and Service Design

⁠⁠⁠SPRAT & SPEX Deep Dive requirements

The Species Profiles and Threats (SPRAT) Database is the authoritative source of data about Australia's EPBC Act listed species, ecological communities and key threatening processes. SPRAT is critical data within the Department underpinning regulatory decisions, investment decisions, conservation planning and nature positive outcomes. SPRAT data is also used extensively outside the Department by a wide range of stakeholders and applications.

SPRAT profiles provide: 

• threatened category 
• migratory or marine listing
• names in current and past legislative instruments
• when a species or ecological community were listed in their threatened category (date effective)
• whether a species or ecological community is under assessment
• current and superseded conservation advice, listing advice, recovery plans, threat abatement plans and wildlife conservation plans
• legislative instruments

SPRAT also provides compiled reports of: changes to the lists of threatened species, threatened ecological communities and key threatening processes; the migratory species list; adopted and made recovery plans, and comparative threatened listings in Australian jurisdictions.

SPRAT is a nationally critical database underpinning environmental approvals and conservation planning under the EPBC Act. However, the system is built on outdated technologies and faces significant cybersecurity, stability, and usability risks. Manual processes, poor accessibility, and lack of integration hinder efficiency and compliance.

Conservation documents linked to from SPRAT hold valuable information that is not easily integrated into decisions making processes and requires investment in processes to extract this information and store as structured data in Departmental data repositories.

To address these challenges, the SPRAT Modernisation and Service Design Project aim to:

• Replace legacy technologies with secure, enterprise-supported solutions.
• Develop a modern data and information service including, better user interface and APIs for internal and external stakeholders.
• Improve data integrity, automate workflows, and enable typology-based data storage.
• Ensure SPRAT and conservation planning data and information is able to deliver information to support environmental reforms.