How Data Can Transform Ecosystem Management and Monitoring in Protected Areas

In recent years, biodiversity loss has emerged as a critical challenge for Scotland’s landscape, prompting two urgent questions: How do we effectively monitor Protected Areas, and how do we use this knowledge to halt nature’s decline? NatureScot, has been tackling these questions head-on, and its collaboration with CivTech and Informed Solutions has been a crucial part of the journey.

Back in 2019, NatureScot posed a bold question as part of its Innovate for Nature CivTech Challenge: “How do we develop a meaningful understanding of the biodiversity crisis to inform the actions we need to take to address it?” This challenge was set in the context of the global initiative, 30 by 30, which seeks to protect or conserve 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030—a target Scotland has committed to achieving.

Currently, around 18% of Scotland’s land and freshwater is designated as protected, but if it is to meet the 30% target, it needs to expand that coverage by 66% over the next five years. Doing this means rethinking how it monitors the health of these areas—and that’s no easy task. The organisation was finding that its existing resources were already stretched to fulfil its current commitments accurately and effectively – the sheer scale of landscapes and marine areas its responsible for protecting makes accurate and timely assessment challenging.

The CivTech Challenge: Harnessing AI and Earth Observation Data Analytics

In 2022, as part of the broader Innovate for Nature Challenge, CivTech launched Challenge 8.5, inviting innovative companies to explore how technology could help us manage Scotland’s protected areas and deliver our commitment to 30 by 30.

Reflecting on the journey, Dave Genney, Protected Areas and Surveillance Manager, NatureScot, shared his thoughts on the partnership:

“After a competitive process, we selected Informed Solutions to partner with us. Their best-in-class expertise in AI, data analytics, and geospatial technology—along with their excellent User-Centred Design approach – provided the perfect partnership, working collaboratively with our in-house experts to problem-solve and innovate together.

“Our partnership has developed a scalable cloud-based system that integrates a broad range of evidence sources. These include Earth Observation (EO) data, such as satellite imagery, as well as historical documents and records from years of previous monitoring work. The system creates actionable, ‘decision-ready’ data for our teams, embedded in a tailored, intuitive user-centred workflow. This new platform has transformed the management of our area monitoring activities, driven scalability and efficiency, and helps us identify signs of environmental stress much earlier for interventions.”

A Collaborative Approach to Monitoring Nature’s Health

One of the standout elements of this collaboration was the deeply integrated, user-driven approach. Together with NatureScot, we worked closely with its Site Condition Monitoring (SCM) teams across both marine and terrestrial environments. By involving the people directly managing our natural assets, we ensured the solution was grounded in the real-world challenges they face and robust scientific approaches.

Through iterative prototyping and constant feedback from testing with users, we deployed InformedINSIGHT™, a powerful cloud-based environmental asset monitoring platform that enables NatureScot to monitor Scotland’s ecosystems—whether forests, peatlands, marine habitats, or rivers—at a range of scales. Crucially, the platform has AI-driven capability to pull together and analyse diverse data sources and make these ‘decision ready’ for use in practical business workflows, enabling teams to pinpoint changes in ecosystem health before it’s too late.

What Does InformedINSIGHT™ Do?

At its core, InformedINSIGHT™ provides a flexible, scalable, and future-proof way to manage the complexity of monitoring environmental assets and biodiversity. It enables prioritisation of efforts by analysing multiple data sources at multiple scales, from satellite imagery to eDNA, to determine which areas need the most immediate attention and tailor monitoring assessments and interventions accordingly.

This is especially important toward the 30 by 30 target. By streamlining much of the prioritisation and analysis process, the platform allows NatureScot teams to respond with a preventative approach to environmental changes rather than being overloaded by reactive monitoring.

InformedINSIGHT™ is reforming a whole organisation approach to environmental monitoring, offering a scalable solution that is essential to managing the significant increase in protected areas through powerful capabilities that enable:

1. Prioritisation: Focussing efforts on areas that will deliver the greatest ecological outcomes, ensuring that resources are strategically allocated for maximum impact.
2. Integration of  New and Continually Improving Data Sources: Harnessing innovative data sources, models and processing techniques, supporting  continuous improvement and advancing innovation pathways.
3. Optimisation: By offering flexible configurations the platform facilitates monitoring across multiple sites and features, reducing effort duplication and enhancing operational efficiency.
4. Future-Proof monitoring: Building on a flexible, cloud-based architecture that not only minimises operational costs through cloud-native capabilities and automation, but also allows for rapid, efficient updates to meet evolving needs, threats and challenges.

What’s Next? Scaling for Impact

Informed is excited to be rolling out InformedINSIGHT™ nationally across Scotland in the coming months and we think it has the potential to deliver similar benefits throughout the world, across a host of other countries mobilising to meet the 30 by 30 challenge. With NatureScot’s and CivTech’s support, we are taking this product to international markets and other organisations in the environmental asset monitoring and performance space. By sharing these innovations, we’re placing Scotland at the heart of the worldwide effort to tackle the impacts of climate change and halt the future loss of important biodiversity.

This partnership has shown that when technology and ecology come together, we can develop real-world solutions that can accelerate our response to these existential challenges and threats.