The UK Biodiversity Indicators give a snapshot of the current status of biodiversity in the UK and how it’s changing.
The Indicator – Biodiversity information for conservation decision making – has just been published by the JNCC (Joint Nature Conservation Committee). It presents trends in the use of biodiversity records, download events, and total number of users. Data for this indicator is provided by the NBN Atlas.
Evaluating the evidence
Good policy making and evaluation is based on evidence. Millions of biological observations (records) have been recorded in the UK over the past century by a wide variety of organisations and individuals. This indicator provides an evaluation of the use and spatial resolution of records in the NBN Atlas over time, as a proxy for the evidence available to underpin conservation decision making.
Data for this indicator can be found in the published datafile on the JNCC website.
A new approach to developing the indicator
This indicator has been substantially redeveloped, and as a result is not directly comparable with the previous publication. This is due to the need for closer alignment with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF); this is the headline indicator for GBF Target 21. In addition, significant changes in data and methods at the NBN Atlas means that it is not possible to continue the previous data series. Feedback from users suggests that the new approach of presenting the date associated with a record, rather than the date a record was uploaded, is more useful.
Key results
- In 2019 688 million records were downloaded from the NBN Atlas; this increased by 50.5% to over 1 billion records in 2024.
- In 2019 the number of download events was 11,889. This increased 341% to 52,482 download events in 2024.
- In 2019 the number of users downloading records was 2,423. This increased 79.4% to 4,346 in 2024.
(Notes for each of these statistics can be found on the JNCC website with the full Indicator information, as shown below)
Full details and further information
The full detail of the Biodiversity information for conservation decision making can be found on the JNCC website
More information on all the UK Biodiversity Indicators can also be found on the JNCC website