The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas is the UK’s largest repository of publicly available biodiversity data. The Atlas enables wildlife records to be shared in a controlled way with the many organisations and individuals who may wish to use it, e.g. to educate and inform, and in environmental decision-making, state of the environment assessments and restoration and rewilding.
Records from iRecord are regularly shared to NBN Atlas, on behalf of the national recording schemes and other recording projects who make use of the Indicia data warehouse. This includes records added to iRecord, to other Indicia systems, and those records from iNaturalist that are imported into iRecord for verification. Once shared to the NBN Atlas they are also passed on to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Many recording schemes and projects make use of iRecord's automated monthly uploads to the NBN Atlas. The latest automated upload in September 2025 consisted of over 7 million species records, across 78 datasets, of which 330,000 records were new since the previous month. Further millions of Indicia records arrive with NBN Atlas independently of the automatic process, sent directly by recording schemes that prefer to download the data from Indicia and include in their own uploads to the Atlas.
There are still some gaps in the dataflow, where records in Indicia are not yet going to the Atlas, and we continue to work with recording schemes and other stakeholders to fill in the gaps.
Many thanks to the increasing number of recording scheme verifiers who help check the records and keep the data flowing. We now have around 1,000 registered verifiers on iRecord, with over 200 new verification roles having been established during 2025 (so far!).
