What is Biodiversity.fi?

Biodiversity.fi is a national indicator collection reflecting the state and development of biodiversity in Finland. It has been developed in close cooperation between Finnish research institutes, state authorities, universities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Its main goal is to bring up to date research based information on the changes in Finnish nature as well as the factors driving these changes to everyone's disposal.

The web pages are based on the use of indicators by the help of which the most important and best known changes may be portrayed.

Biodiversity.fi has also been developed to support biodiversity related decision making and to fulfil international monitoring obligations. Besides the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Finland is bound by EU's Sixth Environment Action Programme 2002–2012, which ambitious goal is to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010. Measuring progress towards this goal is one of the central tasks of Biodiversity.fi.

Development project

The indicators at Biodiversity.fi are the result of several years of development work. In 2006–2009 the indicators were developed in an Environmental Cluster Research Programme project financed by the Ministry of the Environment. The work was coordinated by researchers from the Finnish Environment Institute. Involved were also researchers and experts from The Finnish Forest Research Institute, Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute, Natural History Museum of the University of Helsinki, Metsähallitus, BirdLife Finland and South Karelia Allergy and Environment Institute.

Research Director Heikki Toivonen from the Finnish Environment Institute acted as the leader of the project whereas Environment Counsellor Mikko Kuusinen from the Ministry of the Environment oversaw it on behalf on the financer. The project's steering group included representatives from all the partners listed above.

Cooperation

In addition to the partners involved in the development project, several other organisations also participate in developing Biodiversity.fi. Information on all the partners and their roles can be found from here. One of the aims of Biodiversity.fi is to increase cooperation between different data providers and government sectors. The signifigance of cooperation has been highlighted by the fact the national biodiversity indicators can be found on their own independent domain and not as a part of any research institutes own web pages, for example.

We also hope that Biodiversity.fi will further encourage volunteers to participate in monitoring shema such as breeding bird, butterfly and game counts. The results of several of these counts have now been utilised for the first time as measures of the overall state and development of biodiversity. It has been evaluated that some 70% of all biodiversity monitoring work in Finland is carried out by volunteers.