Data Study Group Final Report: National Biodiversity Network Trust

Spatiotemporal analysis of priority species records across England

Abstract

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) is a collaborative partnership created to exchange biodiversity information. The NBN Trust, the charity which oversees and facilitates the development of the Network, has a membership including many UK wildlife conservation organisations, government, country agencies, environmental agencies, local environmental records centres and many voluntary groups.

 

The NBN Trust promotes the sharing and use of biodiversity data, which is achieved through their digital data sharing infrastructure, the NBN Atlas. The Atlas (https://nbnatlas.org/) is the UK’s largest publicly accessible source of biodiversity data. Biodiversity data (also known as ‘biological records’ or ‘species occurrence data’) is information about what species are found where.

 

We worked with a dataset extracted from the NBN Atlas comprising all records of the 943 species of principal importance in England from 1970 to 2020. These priority species were identified as being the most threatened and requiring conservation action under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, and are used in nature conservation to support policy, decision making and nature recovery. However, the dataset included 911 species only, as not all the 943 species of principal importance have been recorded on the NBN Atlas in the time period. This dataset included 10,202,929 records.

Citation information

Data Study Group Team. (2023). Data Study Group Final Report: National Biodiversity Network Trust - Spatiotemporal analysis of priority species records across England (Version 1). The Alan Turing Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10063986

Additional information

  • Khushboo Gurung, University of Leeds

  • Corinna Hartinger, University of Oxford

  • Silvia Liverani, Queen Mary University of London

  • Hao Ni, University of Birmingham

  • Pornpanit Rasivisuth, University College London

  • Fusun Recal, Isik University Istanbul

  • Simon Rolph, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

  • Sophie Sadler, Swansea University

  • Andrea Sante, Liverpool John Moores University

  • Fiona Seaton, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

  • Alisa Sheinkman, University of Edinburgh

  • Dongyu Zheng, University of Leeds