West of England Mayoral Combined Authority creates greener future with Opendatasoft-powered data portal

Launches interactive Local Nature Recovery Strategy and toolkit to engage stakeholders and drive environmental improvements

BOSTON, MA, UNITED STATES, January 8, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Opendatasoft, the leading Data Portal solution provider, announced today that it has been selected by the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority to provide the technology for its open data portal. The Mayoral Combined Authority was set up in 2017 to make decisions and investments that benefit people living and working in Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol and South Gloucestershire, in the west of the United Kingdom.

Providing 90 datasets from the Mayoral Combined Authority, its partners and the unitary authorities it works with, the data portal aims to drive transparency, demonstrate the region’s economic strength to attract investment, encourage the shift to net zero and accelerate nature recovery. It includes data on energy performance in buildings, access to green space, pollinator projects and information on how money is spent.

A key focus for the portal is the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS), the first published by an English local authority. As well as the LNRS itself, the portal contains an interactive toolkit. This data product provides an intuitive resource that helps farmers, landowners, businesses, local authorities, community groups and citizens to take effective action to restore nature and natural habitats. Accessed through a drill-down map, users can zoom in to view specific, detailed areas, click to see current biodiversity levels and pictures of local species, and link directly to resources, such as available environmental grants and programmes that can aid nature recovery. Local authorities are also able to use the toolkit as part of the planning process to meet requirements to increase biodiversity.

The Mayoral Combined Authority is the first organization to release this underlying data in an open format, enabling users to access it in multiple ways, create compelling visualizations on the platform, download the data for analysis offline, or integrate it into their own apps through the API.

The West of England Mayoral Combined Authority has used the portal and toolkit to provide key data in accessible and attractive ways to engage stakeholders, enabling them to take action. Opendatasoft’s technology underpins this sharing, delivering an intuitive, visual experience to users that helps to improve the environment across the region.

The Mayoral Combined Authority chose to work with Opendatasoft due to the strength of its technology and excellent customer service. The solution provides the organization with the ability to deliver an intuitive experience to a wide range of non-technical and technical audiences, through interactive visualizations such as maps, charts and pictures, and robust APIs to help data teams build data product applications such as the LNRS toolkit.

“Making environmental data seamlessly available to all is central to understanding and improving biodiversity within the natural world and helping species recover and thrive,” said Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO and co-founder of Opendatasoft. “The pioneering work of the West of England Combined Authority demonstrates how data can be used to involve a wide range of stakeholders - their work provides a template that other public bodies across the globe can learn from, helping them build data products that deliver positive environmental change in their regions and areas.”

Since its launch in January 2024, the portal has seen increasing usage, currently experiencing over 600,000 monthly API calls. Data is constantly being added and enriched, with future areas for development including energy planning, dashboards on economic opportunities and transparency on performance when responding to Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests.

The open data portal can be accessed at https://opendata.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/pages/homepage/

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