About NBN Atlas Northern Ireland

The NBN Atlas Northern Ireland is a free online tool that provides a platform to engage, educate and inform people about the natural world. It will help improve biodiversity knowledge, open up research possibilities and change the way environmental management is carried out in Northern Ireland.

The NBN Atlas Northern Ireland is innovative because the combination of the multiple sources of information about species and habitats, and the ability to interrogate, combine, and analyse these data – in a single location – has not been done before, on this scale. It aims to facilitate learning about and understanding the wildlife of Northern Ireland.

The National Biodiversity Network

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN), a registered charity, has been championing the sharing of biological data in the UK since 2000, with the aim of improving the availability of high resolution and high quality data to provide the evidence base for all environmental decision-making in the UK.

NBN Atlas Infrastructure

The NBN Atlas Northern Ireland is a sub-site of the NBN Atlas which covers the British Isles.  The NBN Atlas is based on the Atlas of Living Australia infrastructure. The National Biodiversity Network has taken this open source platform and redesigned and remastered it in some places – in response to stakeholder needs – to create a bespoke system that is exceptionally useful for UK users.

By adapting an existing platform, costs have been minimised and has resulted in a more powerful and functionally integrated end product.

As the Atlas of Living Australia platform is open source, many other countries around the world have used the same system. This makes our UK biodiversity data compatible with other countries’ biodiversity data and allows users to compare and share data globally.

Moving technology forward

The NBN Atlas is the successor to the NBN Gateway.  It has much more advanced functionality than the NBN Gateway and is more intuitive to use.  The NBN Atlas, uniquely, allows users to interrogate species records, habitat, climate and soil information, geographical boundaries and to use extremely powerful mapping tools through a single portal.  It is also simple to interrogate your own biological records and habitat information, either in isolation or combined with additional information from the online database, as well as downloading and exporting maps and reports or summaries for your own use.

The data partner pages of the NBN Atlas Northern Ireland, can help to link up groups who are working on similar projects, or help enthusiastic amateur biological recorders find local groups or recording schemes in their area.

Open access

Taking the views of the range of NBN members into account the NBN Atlas, and all sub Atlases, are open access by default, except in relation to sensitive species which are restricted.

Every record that is held on the NBN Atlases is licensed with one of three Creative Commons Licences or an Open Government Licence (OGL). The Creative Commons Licences offered are:

• Creative Commons Zero (CC0)
• Creative Commons with Attribution (CC BY)
• Creative Commons, with Attribution, Non-commercial (CC BY-NC)

You can find out more information on Creative Commons licences.

The OGL Licence is for government datasets and is more or less equivalent to the CC BY license. The purpose of the licences is to ensure complete clarity over the permitted uses of data, and to ensure that all NBN data are compatible with GBIF’s licensing standards. The NBN is the UK node for GBIF and encourages data to be shared further than just within the UK.

The NBN Gateway had 120 million records that weren’t available for commercial or research use and many of these records were not visible to the public at all.  By contrast, 81% of datasets assigned to the NBN Atlas have been given either Creative Commons with Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons no rights reserved (CC0)) or Open Government Licence (OGL) licences, making them open and available to all for any (even commercial) purpose. The remaining 19% have a CC BY-NC (Creative Commons with Attribution, Non Commercial) licence associated with them, which still allows open use of the data, only restricting commercial use.

This will revolutionise the use of UK biodiversity data, enabling it to be shared, analysed and researched widely – so that high quality data is freely available to provide the evidence base for environmental decision making, or for the use of the UK’s professional and citizen scientists to better understand and learn about the UK’s rich biodiversity.

More information

For more information about the NBN Atlas, or the NBN Atlas Northern Ireland, please email the team

If you would like to provide data, please read the information on how to share your data