NBN Atlas: Our transformation and re-alignment with the Living Atlas community

Abstract

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas is the largest repository of publicly available biodiversity data in the United Kingdom (UK). Built on the open-source Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) platform, it was launched in 2017 and is part of a global network of over 20 Living Atlases (live or in development). Notably, the NBN Atlas is the largest, with almost twice the number of records as the Atlas of Living Australia. In order to meet the needs of the UK biological recording community, the NBN Atlas was considerably customised. Regrettably, these customisations were directly applied to the platform code, resulting in divergence from the parent ALA platform and creating major obstacles to upgrading. To address these challenges, we initiated the Fit for the Future Project. We will outline our journey to decouple the customizations, realign with the ALA, upgrade the NBN Atlas, regain control of the infrastructure and modernize DevOps practices. Each of these steps played a crucial role in our overall transformation. Additionally, we will discuss a new project that will allow data providers to set the public resolution of all records in a dataset and give individuals and organisations access to the supplied location information. We will also highlight our efforts to leverage contributions from volunteer developers.