For more than twenty years we’ve been making biodiversity data open and accessible to support better decisions about the natural world and to connect people with nature. We currently share over 310 million records online through our flagship product. During this talk, we will cover three key areas:

1) An Introduction to Biological Recording:

We will explain the fundamentals of biological recording and flag how anyone can get involved through community groups and wider monitoring efforts within the Brighton area. We will highlight some of the innovative ways that newcomers can start to identify wildlife and briefly explain how these records flow through the very complicated UK data pathway.

2) Our Flagship

We will give a brief overview of our flagship product and explain how you can access and use data and showcase some new features that were requested by our network of users. We will explain how our plethora of R and python scripts allow us to handle and process data, and shout about some of our favourite packages and functions! We will share some summary statistics on the biodiversity of Brighton, showcasing some frequently sighted species and a few rarities.

3) Opportunities for Collaboration:

We will close our talk with an overview of some recent collaborative work we have undertaken, including our recent work with Datacove helping us develop Shiny dashboards! We will highlight some of our existing corporate partnerships and explain how we can help other organisations mobilise biodiversity data or become more engaged with UK biodiversity monitoring.