Our vision for the Smart Biosphere

The climate and nature crises demand solutions that are both grounded in science and built for systems. Yet today, most environmental data remains fragmented—locked in silos, collected for single purposes, and rarely integrated in a way that supports joined-up action. We believe this is one of the most critical barriers to unlocking nature as a solution to the challenges we face. The Smart Biosphere is our answer.

What is the Smart Biosphere?

The Smart Biosphere is a place-based environmental intelligence platform that combines real-world sensor deployment, data integration, and advanced analytics to create a living, learning system for environmental stewardship. It is built to monitor key ecological indicators—like water quality, soil health, biodiversity, and habitats - in real time and over time, enabling evidence-led decisions by landowners, policymakers, researchers, and investors.

It’s not just a platform; it’s a blueprint. Our long-term ambition is to create a scalable model that can be adopted by other UNESCO Biospheres and ecological regions across the UK and beyond.

Why the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere?

We are starting here in the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere because we believe we have unique structural advantages that make this the ideal testbed for innovation and environmental data integration:

• Manageable complexity: a diverse but bounded land-sea system, large enough to be representative but small enough to fully instrument and understand.
• Established collaboration: with 36 organisations formally part of the Biosphere Partnership, we can draw on two decades of trust, including with farmers and landowners, to deliver sensitive and inclusive environmental monitoring.
• Environmental leadership: as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, North Devon already has international recognition and a track record of nature-based innovation.

Why IGI?

To bring world-class data science and platform rigour to match our environmental ambition, we’ve partnered with IGI, who bring over 30 years of experience in commercial data systems. They have built and maintained industrial-scale data portals for government and business, developed globally deployed geochemical interpretation tools, and bring expertise in machine learning, statistical modelling, and advanced data visualisation.

This combination - local environmental leadership and global-class data science - is what makes the Smart Biosphere different.

What Makes It Different?

We’re not building another dashboard. We’re creating an extensible, sustainable platform to:

• Integrate diverse data sources - from remote sensors to satellite imagery to community observations - into a unified, accessible system.
• Translate data into action - by co-designing outputs for public, commercial, and regulatory use.
• Build trust in environmental data—through open standards, clear metadata, and quantification of uncertainty.

We begin by solving real problems: improving water quality, monitoring biodiversity, restoring soils. But the deeper goal is transformation—to shift how environmental data is collected, shared, and used.

The Smart Biosphere will help make nature visible, measurable, and investable - unlocking nature not only as a passive asset but as an active, engineered solution to man-made problems.