As you will hopefully be aware, the NBN Atlas and NBN Atlas Wales went live on 1st April. The NBN Gateway was turned off at the same time.
This is a really exciting time for the NBN partnership as we move forward with the new data sharing infrastructure, which will allow us to deliver a system that meets all of our needs for years to come.
We would like to reiterate that this is just phase 1 of the project, which means that the NBN Atlas has the same functionality that the NBN Gateway had. As we move forward we will be asking for your input into how the NBN Atlas is developed further to suit the entire Network as well as potential new users.
NBN Atlas URLs
NBN Atlas – nbnatlas.org
NBN Atlas Wales – wales.nbnatlas.org
The NBN Atlas Scotland also now has a new URL – scotland.nbnatlas.org
Records available
We are thrilled to highlight that 217 million records are publicly available on the NBN Atlas, which compares to 95 million on the NBN Gateway.
To put this figure into perspective, GBIF has 728 million records available globally, 28 million of these are provided by UK organisations. This means that the NBN provides approximately 23% of the publicly available biodiversity data in the world. This really is something for us all to be very proud of and to shout about. A huge thank you to all our data partners for making this possible.
Help and FAQs
We have provided a suite of help documents on the NBN Atlas, which can be found by clicking the Help tab on the top navigation bar.
We also have help with using the maps and analysing the data.
We also have some “How to” video tutorials, covering searching and mapping functions. We will be adding to these over the coming months.
We will continue to add to all of the help documentation, but if there is something you need immediate help with please do contact us at support@nbnatlas.org
FAQs
We also have a list of FAQs, but highlight here a few topline queries that have been raised with us this week:
Registering and logging in
You will need to set up a new user account for the NBN Atlas and won’t be able to login with the same account information that you had for the NBN Gateway (although you can register the same details for ease of remembering).
Just click the Login tab at the top right of the home page. You can login through Facebook or Google, but we would recommend that you set up an NBN Atlas account as this will give you greater permissions.
Search facility
You can search a number of different ways in the NBN Atlas:
- From the home page, or you can use the search box on the top left of each page or the search box in the middle of the page. N.B. these search boxes search the whole of the NBN Atlas and will return non-species as well as species information.
- If you only want species results, use the ‘Species’ tab at the top of the page and enter your search term in the box for ‘Search for taxa’
- You can also search by locations, data partners and datasets from the tabs at the top of the page.
Species maps
A simple map showing details of the species records can be accessed using the ‘View Map’ tab on the species page. You can customise this map to show various properties of the records such as licence type, data provider, month & year etc.
Using maps and analysing data
More advanced mapping tools can be found under the “analyse” tab on the navigation bar. Maps will also be returned when you do a direct search for a species and you can then choose how you would like it to display.
Go to our help for analysing the data and using maps.
Terms of Use
The Terms are different to the NBN Gateway terms and conditions and can be found here.
Uploading data
At the moment, data needs to be sent to data@nbnatlas.org You can read about how the data should be formatted in the Share your data section of the website. Alternatively you can submit data through iRecord.
One of the areas for future development is the ability to upload data directly to the NBN Atlas.
Data transfer from NBN Gateway to NBN Atlas
A large proportion of datasets which were previously available through the NBN Gateway were transferred to the NBN Atlas as instructed by Data Partners, and are now available through the NBN Atlas. If your datasets were not transferred and you now wish for them to be available through the NBN Atlas, please complete a Data Partner Agreement with the NBN Trust and submit your data to data@nbnatlas.org. Please be aware that the NBN Gateway did not hold the top copy of any datasets, and any copies JNCC held in support of the NBN Gateway will be permanently deleted.
Web services
Guidance for using web services will be available soon. In the meantime you can test the new EasyMaps function for the NBN Atlas and find out more about using the API.
Feedback
We would like to thank our external testers who took the time to test the NBN Atlas before it went live. All the results were good and the feedback and necessary tweaks to the system are being actioned on an ongoing basis.
Now the NBN Atlas is live, we are still asking for feedback, so if you have any comments or suggestions, we want to hear from you. Please contact us by email at info@nbnatlas.org
Please be as constructive as you can in your feedback and give as much information, including screenshots where relevant, to enable us to deal with your comments efficiently. We will be introducing a specific feedback facility on the NBN Atlas in due course, which will allow you to comment directly into the system.
Thank you for your ongoing support with this major change to how we share our biodiversity data. If you have any questions, please get in touch.