WORK IN PROGRESS
Why is biodiversity an important insight?
Biodiversity is great for people and the planet. Biodiversity is essential for the processes that support all life on Earth, including humans. Without a wide range of animals, plants and microorganisms, we cannot have the healthy ecosystems that we rely on to provide us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. And people also value nature of itself.
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/biodiversity/why-is-biodiversity-important/
Current implementation (Mar 10)
The crop varieties comes from the number of active crop plans (details here: Insights Detail). YouThe non-crop biodiversity comes from GBIF and can be increased by recording sightings on https://inaturalist.org/app.
Suggested improvements
Low hanging fruit:
Add more categories:
fungi
spiders
reptiles
mammals
Further subdivide plants into:
lichens
mosses
Need to see changes over time, perhaps with a slider or line graph (# of species in each category at a certain date)
Being able to drill down into each category to see specific observations of species, including pictures (this is already passed from GBIF). This would help producers actually learn to identify biodiversity on their farm for species groups they might not be familiar with.
Other suggestions:
Comparison of users farm against the average for “similar” farms elsewhere
Integrate with eBird
Landscape diversity (numbers of habitat types, proportions of each habitat type)
Presence of natural areas, hedgerows, riparian buffers, etc.
Background reading
Current implementation: Insights Detail
Observations could be a feed into on-farm biodiversity
Background on GBIF API: LF-2014 - Getting issue details... STATUS