The BioAtlas - Biodiversity Atlas of Croatia project included the implementation of a complex information system that enables the storage, editing, viewing, downloading and sharing of field observations of animal and plant species in Croatia.

The system is implemented on the open-source platform Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) which was adapted to Croatian language and legislative. The ALA project is supported by Australian NCRIS and CSIRO and is being actively developed and maintained by the contributors organized under the Living Atlases community initiative. It is a mature open-source project that currently supports more than 20 national biodiversity portals across the world. It’s also the important part of the GBIF ecosystem which promotes and supports free, open and interoperable access to biodiversity data.

The talk will include the experiences and lessons learned during this challenging implementation of the new system in Croatia that was done in 2024 and is now in production. Talk will focus on geospatial features of the platform, its customized WMS server based on GeoServer and a wide range of spatial and statistical analysis functions.

The project has been implemented by Croatian companies VEROX and Protok for the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition.