Data Study Group Final Report: National Biodiversity Network Trust - Spatiotemporal analysis of priority species records across England

Data Study Groups are week-long events at The Alan Turing Institute bringing together some of the country's top talent from data science, artificial intelligence, and wider fields, to analyse real-world data science challenges.

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.

Data Study Group - May 2023 | The Alan Turing Institute