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This review identifies successful approaches to collating and using biodiversity data in spatial planning and impact assessment, the barriers to obtaining and using existing data sources, and the key data gaps that hinder effective implementation. The analysis is a contribution to the EU BON project funded by the European Commission FP7 research programme, which aimed to identify and pilot new approaches to overcome gaps in biodiversity data in conservation policy at European and national levels. The consideration of biodiversity in impact assessments and spatial planning requires spatially explicit biodiversity data of various types. Where spatial plans take account of biodiversity, there are opportunities through Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of development plans and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of individual development proposals to ensure that consented activities are consistent with no net loss of biodiversity or even a net gain, and help to maintain or develop coherent ecological networks. However, biodiversity components of SEAs and EIAs have often been found to be of insufficient quality due to the lack of data or the inadequate use of existing data. Key obstacles to providing access to biodiversity data include the need for data standardisation and data quality governance and systems, licensing approaches to increase data access, and lack of resources to target gaps in data coverage and to develop and advertise policy-relevant data products. Existing data platforms differ in the degree to which they successfully provide a service to spatial planners and impact assessment practitioners. Some local governments, for example Somerset County Council in the UK and the Bremen federal state in Germany, have invested in integrated data collection and management systems that now provide intensively used tools for spatial planning and impact assessment informed by local data collection and monitoring. The EU BON biodiversity data portal aims to provide a platform that is an access point to datasets relevant to essential biodiversity variables on species, habitats and ecosystems. The EU BON taxonomic backbone provides an integrated search function for species and taxa according to different classifications, and also provides a range of tools for data analysis and decision-support. This will increase the accessibility of the vast range of biodiversity data available in different sources and allow the targeting of future data collection to address current gaps.

The EU BON (“Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network”) project has made important contributions towards the achievement of global conservation targets. This infographic illustrates EU BON's contributions towards the achievement of Aichi Biodiversity Target 19 "By 2020, knowledge, the science base and technologies relating to biodiversity, its values, functioning, status and trends, and the consequences of its loss, are improved, widely shared and transferred, and applied.”

A workshop held at the University of Cambridge in May 2017 brought developers, researchers, knowledge brokers, and users together to discuss user-centred design of decision support tools. Decision support tools are designed to take users through logical decision steps towards an evidence-informed final decision. Although they may exist in different forms, including on paper, decision support tools are generally considered to be computer- (online, software) or app-based. Studies have illustrated the potential value of decision support tools for conservation, and there are several papers describing the design of individual tools. Rather less attention, however, has been placed on the desirable characteristics for use, and even less on whether tools are actually being used in practice. This is concerning because if tools are not used by their intended end user, for example a policy-maker or practitioner, then its design will have wasted resources. Based on an analysis of papers on tool use in conservation, there is a lack of social science research on improving design, and relatively few examples where users have been incorporated into the design process. Evidence from other disciplines, particularly human-computer interaction research, illustrates that involving users throughout the design of decision support tools increases the relevance, usability, and impact of systems. User-centred design of tools is, however, seldom mentioned in the conservation literature. The workshop started the necessary process of bringing together developers and users to share knowledge about how to conduct good user-centred design of decision support tools. This will help to ensure that tools are usable and make an impact in conservation policy and practice.

This study focuses on rural development policy implementers and evaluators as users of European biodiversity data. It critically analyses the use of biodiversity data for measuring the impact of agri-environment programmes and related rural development funding, and highlights good practices from a range of countries. The examples show the possibilities for better targeting and evaluation of agricultural funding to biodiversity conservation if sufficient biodiversity data are available and are used in policy. However, many biodiversity datasets exist at the national or regional but are still not integrated in the RDP monitoring system and thus not accessible to evaluators, and many RDPs still feature only the obligatory EU-level indicators. It is important to differentiate between the need for standardised EU-level datasets that can be used for an overall assessment of the impact of the CAP, where there is still a huge data gap, and the national or regional programming level, where there are often existing data that are not being used for various reasons. The study is part of the EU BON project, which aimed to build an integrated biodiversity information system for Europe.