The new umwelt.info information service will benefit researchers, administrations and civil society initiatives as well as school classes, journalists and businesses. The concept: to make all information and data relating to environmental protection and nature conservation easy to find in one place. This should improve the transparency of publicly available information.
Data and information are a crucial basis for sustainable development
Whether it’s a water protection project, an initiative to improve air quality or a start-up developing new technologies, all rely on quality data. Project leaders can better understand specific problems and develop suitable solutions. However, data sets relating to nature and the environment aren’t all accessible in one place. They are held by individuals, organisations, companies or the public sector. Because of this, it’s hard for researchers to search for the data they need. The European Commission has already criticised this fragmentation of the data available in Germany.
The National Centre for Environmental and Nature Conservation Information was founded at the Federal Environment Agency in Merseburg in 2023. Their aim? To make access to environmentally relevant data and information easier. The team’s main objective is to set up and operate the umwelt.info data and information portal.
The team is exploring the data landscape in Germany through a curated process with organisations that hold data, such as federal or state authorities, scientific institutions and associations. “We start by making contact with the organisations. Then, their data and information are catalogued so they can be searched in umwelt.info. The original data and information remain with the primary data sources,” reports Anne Nicolay-Guckland from umwelt.info.
When you enter a query into the portal’s search mask, you immediately receive a large amount of measurement data, press releases and information pages. Each piece of content has its own Metadata, describing the content in more detail. The Metadata could include descriptive text, location and time reference, information on its licence, its source and associated keywords.
umwelt.info promotes transparency and open source participation
In addition to providing information, the team is also keen to encourage the provision of open data. “With our catalogue, we offer human- and machine-readable reuse of the entire German environmental and nature conservation information landscape. The in-house development of the catalogue is freely accessible on the openCode platform in order to strengthen digital sovereignty in public administration. In this way, we are promoting transparency and the participation of the open source community,” says Anne Nicolay-Guckland.
They have currently collected a substantial data set, which is set to grow further. This could make the umwelt.info search engine a valuable source of information for all those working in the environmental field.
Beyond Germany, Miljøportal is doing similar work in Denmark. Ireland, New Zealand and Austria also have country-specific portals. The European Environment Agency and the European data portal are useful sources for Europe-wide data.
