The new Luonnontila website: Monitoring of biodiversity easily accessible
This October, the Finnish Environment Institute relaunched the Luonnontila.fi website. The Luonnontila website summarises biodiversity monitoring data for Finland in the form of easy to understand indicators. The indicators can be used to evaluate the state and progress of ecosystem and species declines and recoveries. The Luonnontila.fi website is aimed at the media, decision-makers, the education sector as well as members of the general public interested in the state of nature. Biodiversity indicators are key to evaluating environmental policy and its implementation including the targets recently agreed to at the Kunming-Montreal Conference for the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The Finnish Museum of Natural History (Luomus) has played a key role in the development of the new Luonnontila.fi. Many of the indicators are based on Luomus run monitoring programmes such as the Winter Bird Count. Luomus has also been central in automating the creation of indicators from the monitoring data that is stored in the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF). For the new Luonnontila website, Luomus's software developers have built a service to update the indicators as soon as new monitoring data becomes available in FinBIF. This means decision makers and the public can be made aware of changes in the state of the environment much more quickly than before.
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William Morris
IT Specialist
UNIT OF BIODIVERSITY INFORMATICS
william.morris@helsinki.fi