The National Centre for Environmental and Nature Conservation Information, which has been operating at the Merseburg site in Saxony-Anhalt since January 2023, is responsible for the portal. Currently 13 employees of the German Environment Agency (UBA) are working here to make umwelt.info a central access point to all publicly available information on environmental and nature conservation-related topics throughout Germany.
umwelt.info will initially be published in a test version as a so-called Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This will allow users to provide feedback and participate in the development process. The first opportunity to do so is the online event taking place on 25 June, at which the functionalities and the umwelt.info team will be presented. There are contact forms on the website itself that users can use to provide feedback. All feedback will be systematically analysed and used for the further development process until the final completion of the portal, which is expected in January 2025.
Two core functions already available
The first version of the portal already offers users two core functions. Firstly, a search engine for publicly available knowledge relating to environmental protection and nature conservation throughout Germany. With today's launch, users can already search more than 100 data and information services from public authorities, science and civil society. The nationwide knowledge resource in the umwelt.info search is intended to make environmentally relevant data and information from all sectors and federal levels easier to find and to relate to each other.
In addition, users will gain an initial insight into the editorial work, which is still being developed in terms of topics and personnel. The articles currently available provide information about the centre and umwelt.info as well as aspects of data availability for specific subject areas.
The umwelt.info portal's first editorial content is a map that summarises official groundwater monitoring sites in Germany. The primary information and data services are directly accessible. This is helpful for researchers in terms of further use and interlinking with their own data sets in order to investigate scientific questions, for example on drought in Germany.
The project initially started with a conceptual phase, which was completed in summer 2023 with a comprehensive implementation concept. The processes for data integration were then trialled in a prototype environment.
The portal is being developed as an open source project and can be viewed publicly at https://gitlab.opencode.de/umwelt-info . All interested parties are welcome to contribute to the project in this way.
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