The National Biodiversity Network (UK) (NBN) is a collaborative venture set up in 2000 in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
committed to making
biodiversity
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (''genetic variability''), species (''species diversity''), and ecosystem (''ecosystem diversity'') l ...
information available through various media, including on the internet via the NBN Atlas—the data search website of the NBN.
Description
It is estimated that up to 60,000 people routinely record biodiversity information in the
UK and
Ireland
Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...
. Most of this effort is voluntary and is organised through about 2,000 national societies and recording schemes. The UK government through its agencies also collects biodiversity data and one of the principal elements for the collation and interpretation of this data is the network of Local Environmental Records Centres.
In 2012, it had been listed in the top 1,000 UK charities that raised most donations.
NBN Trust
The NBN Trust
—the organisation facilitating the building of the Network—supports agreed standards for the collection, collation and exchange of biodiversity data and encourages improved access. The present partnership consists of over 200 public and voluntary organisations and individual members.
The NBN Atlas currently holds over 230 million species records from over 900 different
dataset A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...
s (September 2020).
Data on the NBN Atlas can be accessed by anyone interested in UK, Northern Ireland and Isle of Man wildlife and can be searched at many different levels, as it allows the viewing of distribution maps and the downloading of data by using a variety of interactive tools. The maps can be customised by date range and can show changes in a species’ distribution.
The organisation believes that, by providing tools to make wildlife data accessible in a digitised and exchangeable form and by providing easy access to the information people need, wise and informed decisions can be made to ensure the natural environment is protected now and for future generations.
In April 2017 the NBN Atlas replaced the NBN Gateway.
Team
The National Biodiversity Network Trust employs a team to facilitate and co-ordinate its growth and development and is referred to as the 'Secretariat'. The NBN Trust is a registered charity.
See also
*
Biological recording Biological recording is the scientific study of the distribution of living organisms, biological records describe the presence, abundance, associations and changes, both in time and space, of wildlife.Burnett, J., Copp, C., Harding, P. (1995) Biolog ...
References
External links
*
NBN Atlas(data)
View the NBN Strategy 2015 -2020Association of Local Environmental Records Centres- for more information on Local (Biological) Records Centres
National Forum for Biological Recording
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Biodiversity
Ecology organizations
Ecological experiments
Biodiversity databases