NBN Atlas Case Study: The Rivers Trust, Invasive Species and BioBank Data

Post published:3 February 2023
Post category:General / Resource

An article in the recent National Biodiversity Network (NBN) News highlighted a particular case study that caught my eye. The article discusses a piece of work developed undertaken by The Rivers Trust in partnership with the NBN team to make Atlas driven data layers available on ArcGIS Online, a system I have recently been working with here at BioBank.

The new layers are hosted as open data on the ArcGIS Online spatial portal, making it even easier for people to access web based spatial layers directly into ArcGIS or QGIS through Web Services. The new Web Services also allow for the data to be queried directly within your preferred GIS.

How is this relevant to us?

Biobank is of course the local node for the NBN so we certainly take an interest in any work that is undertaken by the network! More than that, much of the species data we manage on your behalf is provided responsibly to better inform the NBN Atlas.

This Rivers Trust work is particularly relevant as back in 2018 Defra enabled us to share select species data at full resolution and under and full open data license, on the NBN Atlas. While they decided not to continue that work the dataset continues to be in place and has been used to enhance this most recent work for our local area. As a result, if you submitted invasive species to us it has now been made available via these new web services and is available to help inform river conservation work such as that undertaken by our colleagues at the Mersey Rivers Trust!

Species currently included are;