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BIOATLAS –

BIODIVERSITY ATLAS OF CROATIA

Mostar, July 18th, 2025.

Marko Turković, Tomislav Obad, Marko Pleić

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Biodiversity in Croatia

    • Specific position at the intersection of three biogeographical regions:
      • Continental
      • Alpine
      • Mediterranean
    • Wide range of different ecological conditions leads to great diversity of habitats and species

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Nature protection in Croatia

    • 37% of country area in Natura 2000 sites (ranks 2nd in EU)
    • Over 10 000 of speleologcal objects
    • Protected areas:
      • 2 Strict Reserves
      • 8 National Parks
      • 81 Special Reserves
      • 12 Nature Parks
      • 2 Regional Parks …
    • Estimated 50 000 to over 100 000 species living in Croatia

Ecological network areas under the Birds Directive

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Ecological network areas under the Habitats Directive

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Threat and conservation assesments in Croatia

    • Over 3200 threat assessments in the Red List of wild species in Croatia
      • Data Deficient in 20.8%
    • Almost 900 reports on the conservation status of species and habitat types
      • Data unknown in 47%

XX

FV

U1

U2

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A Global Biodiversity Observing System

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GBIF

  • GBIF - international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

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GBIF Croatia

  • Croatia - GBIF member from 2022.
  • Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition
    • Croatian GBIF node and national focal point for inventory and monitoring of biodiversity
    • responsible for establishing Croatian Nature Protection Information System

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A need for the new Information System

  • Always-on system
    • Offers continuous, fast, independent access to data
    • Enables access to a large amount of up-to-date data
    • With less time and resource consumption for users and administrators
  • Requirements
    • Open-source
    • Uses GBIF data models (Darwin Core Standard)
    • Has a large community of users
    • Supports hundreds of millions of occurrences

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-> Atlas of Living Australia!

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Atlas of Living Australia https://www.ala.org.au/

  • Collaborative, digital, open infrastructure that pulls together biodiversity data from multiple sources, making it accessible and reusable
  • 281 Public Repositories
  • Developed since 2012.

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https://github.com/atlasoflivingaustralia/

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Becoming the part of Living Atlases Community

  • In 2023. Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition contracted Croatian companies VEROX and Protok to establish the Croatian Biodiversity IS (CroFauna)
  • During the project Croatia became a part of the Living Atlases community
  • Currently there are 23 Biodiversity Information Systems based on Atlas of Living Australia software

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2024. - BioAtlas was born!

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BioAtlas – Biodiversity Atlas of Croatia

  • Implementation of ALA platform + custom developed modules
  • Very challenging project deadline (less than 1 year to implement)!
  • https://bioatlas.bioportal.hr/

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Video demo

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What’s next

    • Expanding the user network
    • Education campaigns
    • Ingesting of new data sources
    • System maintenance and upgrades

https://bioportal.hr/en/get-involved/

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Q&A

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Thanks for the attention!

Questions?

Find additional information at:

https://bioatlas.bioportal.hr/

or contact us via e-mail:

marko@verox.hr, tomislav@verox.hr

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