The winner of the 2024 John Sawyer NBN Open Data Award, announced at the NBN Conference in Liverpool in November, was the Terrestrial Heteroptera Recording Scheme (Shieldbugs & allied species).
This Award is given to a member of the National Biodiversity Network Trust who is making a valuable contribution to open biodiversity data in the UK, and helping achieve the NBN Trust’s mission of “making data work for nature”.
The Terrestrial Heteroptera Recording Scheme (Shieldbugs & allied species) shares over 160,000 records of 95 species from the taxon group, in three data resources on the NBN Atlas. 100% of the records have verified identifications, 89% of the records are shared on an Open licence and 82% have a resolution of 100m or higher. The datasets cover the period 1800 to October 2024.
Tristan Bantock, scheme organiser, said:
“I am very honoured to receive the award – I have always been a huge advocate of open data and it has been extremely gratifying to watch the shieldbugs & allies recording scheme data grow into such a comprehensive resource and become an important and useful biological dataset”.
Unfortunately, Tristan was unable to attend the Award ceremony, but Martin Harvey of the Biological Records Centre, accepted the award on his behalf.