About the Environmental Information Platform

The Environmental Information Platform provides enhanced access to UKCEH's key data holdings via web-based tools. It enables you to visualise and interrogate the diverse environmental datasets held by UKCEH.

UKCEH's Environmental Information Platform provides enhanced access to our key data holdings. The platform enables researchers, policy makers and the public not only to discover CEH data easily but also to access, analyse, interrogate and visualise the data through a single platform. It provides a range of tools to make our environmental research data more reusable and accessible, increasing the impact of our science outputs. Initially these tools include:

  • UKCEH Drought portal
    Explore over 50 years of drought statistics for Great Britain
  • UK Rainfall
    Map plot and download daily and monthly rainfall data from the 1km CEH-GEAR datasets for Great Britain and Northern Ireland

More tools are already in development.

 

 

Data Catalogue

Datasets held by the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) can be found by searching or browsing the EIDC's data catalogue using a text and/or map search option. Each data resource has its own page, providing a description, background information, digital object identifier (where available) and links from which the dataset can be downloaded or ordered. Datasets are available under the Open Government Licence where possible, and licences for each dataset are provided.

First-time users are required to create a login prior to downloading datasets.

Applications for working with data

In addition, the platform also allows us to build applications for different audiences, focussed on different areas or datasets. These applications allow us to deliver datasets directly to end-users in the most appropriate way. These include visualisations via timelines, maps and graphs, as well as tools for extracting data for an area of interest.

Direct access to data

The platform can also provide programmatic access to datasets where appropriate, to enable users to integrate datasets into their own research or applications directly from source. This is particularly useful for dynamic datasets or for access to smaller portions of very large datasets. Where possible we follow open-standards in providing this access, such as those for Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS), but also provide other commonly used protocols such as OpenDAP and web services based on REST.

Tools for analysis and modelling

We intend to provide a range of analysis and modelling tools to further enhance access to our data and make our science more directly usable, through applications and programming interfaces.

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