The project facilitated and accelerated the NBN Trust’s work to enhance the value of the NBN Atlas to the UK conservation community through two complementary streams of work.

Stream 1: The first stream implemented high-priority, high-impact enhancements to the platform to improve accessibility and ease of use, helping to mobilise open and accessible biodiversity data.

Stream 2: The second stream strengthened a well-connected and functional biodiversity data community and infrastructure, following FAIR and Open Data principles across all sectors of the biodiversity data community.​

A landmark achievement of this project was the development of the first NBN Atlas Strategy, which will guide future development of the NBN Atlas for the next five years. The project delivered significant technical enhancements across data sharing, data quality, visualisation tools, and user experience, while establishing robust governance structures through the reformed NBN Atlas Stakeholder Advisory Group.

These achievements position the NBN Atlas to better serve its 335,000 annual users and support critical decision-making in conservation, policy, and ecological research across the UK.

Mike Prince, Senior Officer, Natural England said:

“There is a wealth of species data that has been, and continues to be, collected by hundreds of organisations and many thousands of individuals. The value of this can only fully be realised through collaboration and data sharing. The NCEA and Natural England have been delighted to support the NBN Trust with Atlas Accelerator to develop new functionality for the NBN Atlas and facilitate an overall increase in quality and quantity of FAIR data.”

Read the NBN Atlas Accelerator Project Report – March 2026

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The NBN Atlas underwent a significant infrastructure upgrade in December 2025 with the transition to the new Pipelines architecture. This marked the culmination of the Pipelines Project, supported by the inaugural AWS IMAGINE grant and delivered by the NBN Atlas Development Team with support from the NBN Atlas Data Team.

The Pipelines Project has seen us adopt systems from the Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which will accelerate record publishing, modernise our data infrastructure, and amplify the conservation impact of shared data. After customising and upgrading the data processing system for UK-specific requirements – like grid references and access controls – throughout 2024/25, we have now been able to release the platform upgrade.

The move to the new Pipelines improves the efficiency of data processing and data sharing with our data partners, while further enhancing overall platform stability.

Go to the NBN Atlas.

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The updates are being delivered through the NBN Atlas Accelerator project 2024/25, which has been developed in partnership with Natural England and funded by Defra through the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services (NCEA) programme. The project aims to maximise the mobilisation, use and impact of biodiversity data that aligns with global standards and helps us achieve our mission of making data work for nature. 

These improvements will be rolled out gradually alongside upgrades to the underlying data processing platform, which forms the final stage of the “Fit for the Future” project to increase efficiency and capacity for handling new data sources.    

NBN Atlas Accelerator Project Enhancements

Data Sharing and Access Improvements 

• eDNA data is now supported in the NBN Atlas. A new template and full guidance has been generated to make it easier for data partners to share occurrence data derived from molecular-based approaches to biodiversity monitoring. 

• Metadata updates: Templates for data partners have been revised to clarify required information, whilst online displays have been updated to improve navigation. The new guidance and help also has details of over 40 Darwin Core Terms the NBN Atlas supports.

• Access Controls: The new function, released earlier this year, enables data partners and users to provide and view full spatial resolution data with appropriate controls. We now have eight data resources shared through access controls, with another four being added during July’s data processing run. Please email data@nbn.org.uk if you are interested in this feature and have your say on how you would like it to be enhanced. 

Data Quality enhancements 

• Citations and references: New fields have been added to link occurrence records to research papers and researcher identifiers, following requests from users for improved citation tracking.  

• Metrics for data partners and data uses: We have been working with Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) and Defra on updating one of the core biodiversity indicators that supports the UK reporting against the Global Biodiversity Framework. This work will ultimately update the previous E1 metric.

• Conservation designations: Species pages will soon include clearer information about conservation status, showing UK Red List status and Nationally Rare and Scarce designations. Updated processes are now in place to maintain current species designation information. 

Data Visualisations 

• Web Map Service (WMS) features: New Web Map Service capabilities are available, in beta version, to help users integrate NBN Atlas maps into GIS applications. Please let us know if you have any feedback on this via the embedded links to the NBN Forum. 

• Embeddable Map Service: A new embeddable map service has been developed to replace the outdated legacy system. It is backward-compatible, offering immediate visual improvements for existing users. The current implementation of the new service is an advanced prototype, providing a strong foundation for a production-ready service. 

• Site wide NBN Atlas maps: Working with FuturesWild.com, we undertook a user discovery workshop and gathered feedback from NBN Atlas users on the current mapping functionality. This resulted in FuturesWild creating new designs for the map components to enhance the navigation, usability and download options, addressing issues raised that we can look to implement in 2025/26. 

• Spatial portal: A major upgrade has been tested and will shortly be rolled out to this powerful analysis tool.  

User Experience Improvements 

• My Profile and Saved Searches: We have upgraded the My Profile section of the NBN Atlas to make it easier to navigate and allow users to save their search criteria, so that they can run the same search another time. Full information on how to access this new feature is available in the help pages.

Further announcements and guidance on new features will be provided as the roll out continues. More guidance and information is available through the NBN Atlas documentation and help pages. 

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The NBN Atlas provides everyone access to all open biodiversity data in one place. However, as it is an open data platform, many data partners have only been able to share generalised records of species, either at 1km or less, to ensure they can maintain their data and manage permissions. Whilst this lower resolution data is useful in context, there are many instances where knowing the precise location of a species is critical.  

Our stakeholders have requested a service that enables them to share the highest resolution data to those with the relevant permission within the NBN Atlas, whilst also allowing them to set the public view at a lower resolution. This service has the added benefits of enhancing the public’s understanding about when there is more precise location information available and who to contact to gain access.  

On request, data providers can give individual NBN Atlas users access to the supplied (original) location information (locality, latitude-longitude coordinates and grid reference) of records of specific species, areas or provide access to entire datasets. 

The supplied location (locality, latitude-longitude coordinates and grid reference) is only available in the data downloads (currently in the simple format only); the location information on the occurrence record page will remain as the generalised values, regardless of the level of access. 

Full guidance and help is available for both data partners to share and manage access to high resolution data and for the public to find and request access on the NBN Atlas Help pages.  

Feedback 

This is the first iteration of Access Controls as a service, so we would appreciate your feedback and suggestions on further feature development and improvements. Please contact us with any comments and feedback.

We hope this single change will prompt many more organisations – including Local Environmental Records Centres, eNGOs and other organisations – to mobilise more of their high quality data to the NBN Atlas. 

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To help us discover what causes the most difficulty and to understand other issues and priorities, we are working together to find a solution that will focus on usability, performance, and future scalability.

Your input to this process is vital, so please help us by completing this simple 6 question survey.

Go to the survey (or click on the Start link / Try Me)

Deadline is Friday 11 April 2025.

Hexdigital and Futures Wild

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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.

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We are now in the final phase of the NBN Atlas Fit for the Future project – a two-year root and-branch upgrade of the platform architecture and code. Achieving this milestone means that we can now start to look forward:

• to plan for the future of the NBN Atlas, and
• to implement changes that maximise the mobilisation, use and impact of biodiversity data.

We are excited to be partnering with Natural England to achieve these goals through the NBN Atlas Accelerator Project. The project is funded by Defra through the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services (NCEA) programme.

NBN Atlas Strategy and Route Map

The NBN Atlas is a major component of the infrastructure that underpins the mobilisation of species data. It performs a core service to the UK conservation sector, and that service must continue to improve and evolve to meet the sector’s changing needs. From eDNA to AI-enabled species recording and identification, we are on the cusp of revolutionary changes in the pace and scale of data collection. It is essential that we are on the front foot and able to respond to this rapidly changing landscape.

The NBN Trust does not currently have the capacity to undertake the strategic planning and stakeholder engagement that is urgently needed. We are therefore addressing this by creating a new, senior post that leads the development of an NBN Atlas Strategy and Route Map.

Data mobilisation

As highlighted by the Geospatial Commission’s 2021 report biodiversity data in the UK is still a long way from being truly FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). As little as 50% of existing data is accessible to the statutory nature conservation bodies and much work is required to remove barriers to wider data sharing. One of the key changes that stakeholders are calling for is the introduction of ‘access controls’ on the NBN Atlas. This would enable data providers to share high-resolution species data on the NBN Atlas but to set the public view at a lower resolution, such that permission would be needed to access the high-resolution data. This single change would prompt many more organisations – including Local Environmental Records
Centres, eNGOs and other organisations – to mobilise their data. We intend to introduce basic access controls in early 2024 and to develop the functionality iteratively over the course of this project.

Data quality and mapping

Alongside implementing access controls, stakeholders have requested many other developments to the NBN Atlas that would enhance the mobilisation, utilisation and impact of biodiversity data. Several of these relate to data quality, which is a very significant consideration for our stakeholders, particularly in the context of increased data mobilisation. Key enhancements that enable data users to readily understand the quality of any given records, and filter out any that don’t meet their needs, are a high priority. Stakeholders also place a high value on the NBN Atlas’ mapping capabilities, which need a major upgrade.

We are currently recruiting a new Full Stack Developer to join our Development team and help deliver the planned enhancements.

Summary

The NBN Atlas Accelerator Project, running from December 2023 to March 2025, will drive greater mobilisation and use of UK biodiversity data. The project will accelerate the NBN Trust’s work to enhance the value of the NBN Atlas to the UK conservation community, by:

• Implementing high-priority, high-impact enhancements to the platform, and
• Creating an NBN Atlas Strategy and Route Map, informed by stakeholder needs, to guide future
  development.

We will bring you project updates as our work progresses through 2024.

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Part of the NBN Atlas Fit for the Future Project, included optimising the management of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and modernising our DevOps (development, testing and delivery) practices. With only a small development team (Helen and Keith), we were having to spend too much time manually managing the platform and were not making full use of the available AWS services.

We therefore turned to AWS to learn how to better structure the NBN Atlas architecture and operate in the cloud. Working alongside CirrusHQ, an AWS Well-Architected Partner, we built a highly scalable, performant, cost-optimised architecture that improved security and disaster recovery protocols and significantly reduced the time that the development team have to spend on firefighting.

Operational health, performance, and cost optimisation reviews were all carried out as part of the process, to stabilise the team’s workload, reduce downtime, and adapt a performance vs cost balance approach. Critically, this has freed up valuable time that can be dedicated to our mission of “making data work for nature.”

We are very grateful that AWS kindly funded this work and really pleased that AWS and CirrusHQ have used the NBN Atlas and NBN Trust work as a case study.

You can read the full detail of the work undertaken in the case study on the AWS website.

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The new NBN Atlas will be easier to maintain and able to adapt to the NBN’s future needs. Improvements will also enable the NBN Trust to manage increases in data volume and different types of data, such as eDNA studies and habitat data.

Project update

We are pleased to report that in January, we reached two significant milestones.

Milestone 1

We completed the decoupling of the NBN customisations (i.e. we removed the elements that had been altered from the ALA) and upgraded the platform code. This is the most important undertaking in the project. The customised code had prevented the NBN Atlas from being upgraded and, over time, it had diverged greatly from the ALA. The first phase of the project was to extract the customised code into another layer. The second phase was to upgrade the code so that it was once again in alignment with the ALA. Phase one and two have now been completed and we are preparing to roll out the upgraded NBN Atlas services to production. This will take place over the next 2-3 months.    

Milestone 2

The first upgraded service, the Authentication Service, went into production. The Authentication Service cuts across the whole of the NBN Atlas Platform, so the upgrade was a considerable undertaking. The Authentication Service is now in line with the ALA. This also means that the Authentication Service has gained many security enhancements and greatly improved compliance with current security protocols or standards, thus improving user protection and privacy, and reducing the risk of security breaches.

NBN Atlas users won’t see any immediate changes to how the Atlas looks, but the enhancements to the system mean that you should see improvements in it its performance.

We will provide further information in due course, but you can read more about the FFTF project and our weekly progress updates on the NBN Atlas.

Important note

As part of our upgrade work, we will be carrying out some essential maintenance on the NBN Atlas between 15:00-17:30 GMT on Wednesday 8 February. During this period, the NBN Atlas will be unavailable. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your support.

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The new NBN Atlas will be easier to maintain and able to adapt to the NBN’s future needs. Improvements will enable the NBN Trust to manage increases in data volume and different types of data, e.g. from eDNA studies.

The project started in April 2022 and will run through until October 2023.

Regular updates on the project will be given on the NBN Atlas FFTF project page

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