Cofnod data on the NBN Gateway

We wanted to let you know that Cofnod have recently shared almost half a million records with the NBN Gateway. With over 127 million species records, the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Gateway has become a major tool for collating and accessing data across the UK. It not only provides a public interface for the UK’s wildlife data but is increasingly used by the UK’s Nature conservation agencies and the likes of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) to fulfil their reporting requirements at the national and international level.

It is important for you to know that we have only shared data where we have explicit permission to do so. If we have not already contacted you to ask if you’d consider giving permission for your data to be shared, we will do so over the next few months. We have not supplied any data which we believe is already held on the NBN Gateway, or which we believe has an established route to the NBN Gateway, for example data from a National Recording Scheme, the Biological Records Centre or Natural Resources Wales.

Data has only been made available at 10km resolution, with minimal details available to the public user (basically species name, grid reference, and (when logged in) date and site name). We can approve more detailed access to data but would only do in very limited circumstances, for example if JNCC wished to use the data to report on the status of species across the UK. We would also grant access to the data to Welsh Government, Natural Resources Wales and National Schemes or Societies, but only where we believe the data cannot be better accessed through our usual means of data supply. Anyone else would be asked to submit a standard data request to us if they wished to access more detailed versions of the records.

The data is now live on the NBN Gateway. If you have any queries about this please do get in touch with Roy or Aisling