A huge thank you and congratulations to all our data partners for helping us achieve 300 million occurrence records being shared in the NBN Atlas.
This is a major milestone and would not be possible without the support of so many species recorders out there everyday, collecting information on all the amazing species around the United Kingdom.
The NBN Atlas
The NBN Atlas is the national biodiversity data repository. Launched in 2017, it is the UK’s largest publicly accessible source of biodiversity data. It brings together data from 180 organisations into a single portal, creating access to information that would otherwise be difficult and costly to locate and utilise. The NBN Atlas is visited by more than 1,000 users a day seeking data to inform policy and development decisions, conservation strategies and interventions, and ecological research. As such, it is central to the mobilisation of biodiversity data and delivers great value for the UK nature conservation community.
Reaching 300 million occurrence records is something for the entire community to be really proud of and celebrate – thank you!
250 million was once an aim
Those who have been involved in the NBN for a while may recall a special event we held in March 2013 – “A quarter of a billion records project – celebrating the present, looking to the future”. This was arranged to celebrate the NBN partnership (formed in 2000) and the roles that each individual organisation plays, as well as the tools that had been developed so far. It also looked forward to what we thought could be achieved in the future, as we hoped to reach 250 million records in the coming years.
In 2013, the precursor to the NBN Atlas, the NBN Gateway, held just over 75 million records. Our then Chairman, Michael Hassell, noted that achieving 100 million records was not too far away, “so that the 250 million in the title to this evening’s event is not all that fanciful”. In fact it was only a year later when we reached 100 million.
Now, here we are, eleven years later and the rest, as they say, is history. We can now “celebrate the present” being 300 million occurrences and who knows how many records the future holds. What we do know is that by continuing to work together to increase the volume, quality, accessibility and impact of biodiversity data, we can truly start to realise our mission of making data work for nature.