It's hoped delivery of the trove of data, facilitated via email from the Canberra-based Australian National Herbarium, will help the PNG government manage conservation and tourism around the popular Kokoda track region.

Australian researchers have been fascinated by the fauna and flora of New Guinea – a Pacific biodiversity hotspot – since the middle of last century.

Until recently, the bulk of their work was recorded on handwritten or typed notes, taped to the specimen and kept in Canberra. CSIRO has begun digitising its PNG collection, adding thousands of records to its existing digital database.

Herbarium curator Brendan Lepschi said the aim in digitising the collection was to make it available for conservation agencies.

"It's a really rich source of data, it's invaluable. But you can't recreate it, and you can't go recollect this stuff, a lot of it is historical," he said.

Altogether, PNG received about 11,778 insect records, 15,269 animal records (amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds) and 79,774 plant records.

It's information the PNG Conservation and Environment Protection Authority is pleased to receive. The country, particularly around popular tourist areas such as the Kokoda track and the Owen Stanley Range, faces increasing foot traffic and the authority wants to protect the region's biodiversity.

"The PNG government is really keen to know what's ecologically sensitive around the track," Mr Lepschi said, adding that the data can be used as a basis of what species occurred where.

"Decision makers can use [the data] to help with understanding what lives where, and why it's there, and they can use that information to inform their conservation."

Meticulous records kept by various researchers over the years has led to a collection of nearly 200,000 PNG specimens being kept at CSIRO's various national research collections.

Recently, CSIRO has begun electronically updating the PNG records and have so far completed about 30 per cent of the collection.

CSIRO said PNG's Conservation and Environment Protection Authority has recently invested resources, through the Kokoda Initiative, to develop a national biodiversity database – making repatriation of such data possible.

"This project is very important for PNG," the authority's James Sabi said.

"It's a substantial vote of confidence from the international community that PNG now has the systems and expertise to manage and provide access to this information, and will enable CEPA to make better biodiversity management decisions."

The delivery of data was a collective effort between multiple government agencies. The herbarium provided data from its own collection, the Australian National Insect Collection, and the Australian National Wildlife Collection to the Australian Department of the Environment, who then provided it to PNG's Conservation and Environment Protection Agency.