National rollout of first-of-its-kind biodiversity monitoring platform at NatureScot enables Scotland to meet ambitious 30 by 30 UN target.
Informed Solutions is proud to announce the national rollout of its cloud-based InformedINSIGHT™ platform at NatureScot, a groundbreaking digital platform that is transforming the management of Scotland’s protected areas, enabling it to rapidly, and efficiently scale its conservation activity to meet its ambitious national targets.
Scotland currently protects only 18% of its terrestrial area, but ensuring that 30% is effectively managed requires expanding protected areas by more than 60%; a challenge that demands a fundamental shift in monitoring approaches. InformedINSIGHT™ offers a future-proof, data-driven solution to meet this need, enabling proactive conservation efforts to scale efficiently.
The unique platform and innovation, supported by the Scottish Government’s CivTech 8.5 Innovate for Nature Accelerator Challenge, unifies, integrates and analyses diverse environmental data sources, including Earth Observation, eDNA, and historical records to deliver actionable, decision-ready data, empowering teams to prioritise at-risk sites and target conservation efforts proactively.
The platform enhances coordination, reduces duplication, and streamlines workflows. Modelling indicates that it is likely to enable a 45% to 66% reduction in protected areas monitoring program operating costs if all reform work is implemented. As a result, it paves the way to being able to monitor marine and the additional 60% of terrestrial areas protected and safeguarded for nature to meet Scotland’s 30 by 30 target, without an increase in programme operating cost.
Alongside these efficiency benefits, the innovation enhances NatureScot’s conservation efforts through four key operational benefits:
- Smart Prioritisation: Directing conservation efforts based on the latest information to where they will have the greatest ecological impact, ensuring strategic resource allocation.
- Innovative Data Integration: Continuously improving monitoring by integrating new and emerging data sources, models, and processing techniques, driving innovation and insight.
- Monitoring Optimisation: Offering flexible configurations for transformed monitoring across sites, reducing duplication of data collection effort and enabling a transition to a landscape-scale understanding of ecosystem health.
- Future-Proofed Monitoring: Built on a cloud-native architecture that minimises costs, automates workflows, and allows rapid updates to adapt to evolving environmental challenges.
“InformedINSIGHT™ is a game-changer for how we monitor and manage Scotland’s protected areas,” says David Genney, Protected Areas and Surveillance Manager at NatureScot. “By laying down the foundations to help us unlock the potential of AI and geospatial data, we can prioritise efforts more effectively, ensuring that Scotland meets its 30 by 30 commitment while using our resources strategically.
“It is innovation like this that makes possible the transformation of our monitoring capability, to enable our teams and experts to approach the protection of Scotland’s biodiversity in new ways that allows us to protect it now and for future generations.”
David Lawton, Chief Innovation Officer, Informed Solutions, adds, “Scotland is now at the forefront of using technology and data to combat biodiversity loss at scale. The challenges faced by NatureScot are shared by environmental protection agencies worldwide, and InformedINSIGHT™ offers a scalable, efficient solution. We look forward to working with other organisations globally to help them achieve their own 30 by 30 ambitions.
“The rollout of InformedINSIGHT™ demonstrates how technology and ecological expertise can effectively collaborate to address the joint crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, setting a new global benchmark for environmental asset management.”
If you would like to understand more about the success of the platform and its capabilities, please contact Tom Hickmott, Product Partnership Manager, at tom.hickmott@informed.com
