Exciting progress has been made in restructuring the way that biodiversity data are displayed across the UK.  

Following the development of the NBN Atlas Scotland, Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales have recognised the potential improvements to the way our collective biodiversity data are viewed and used through the Atlas platform. They therefore, secured funding for the development of an NBN Atlas Wales. This exciting news followed on from the successful pilot project in Scotland, and will help revolutionise the way that species data and interactions are viewed, interpreted, analysed and used in Wales.

The NBN Atlas Wales offers the ability to create a Welsh view, bringing together species and habitat data and offering functionality including the ability to view photographs, search for biological data by predefined areas, by postcode or by polygon search tools, find organisations working in a particular area (geographic or taxonomic) and create alerts for species records.  Additionally, the NBN Atlas Wales provides bilingual functionality, offering users the option to switch between Welsh and English language pages.  

This project is part of the work programme to build NBN Atlas infrastructure for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each of these NBN Atlases has the same functionality and same basic design and is supported by a single database, the NBN Atlas, but offer users a more focused, local view of the national data holdings.

The NBN Atlas Wales has been built using the Atlas of Living Australia’s open source biodiversity data infrastructure.