An online platform developed in the EU which is dedicated to natural capital, ecosystem services and nature-based solutions may soon be going global.

The platform, known as Oppla, was launched in September 2016 by two EU-funded research projects since when it has been growing rapidly.

The new platform, which was built jointly by the EU-funded projects OPERAs and OpenNESS, is meeting with considerable interest, notably from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The UK has been acting as the coordinator for the €11 million-plus  OPERAS and is also one of the participating countries in the €11.4 million-plus  OPENNESS project.

To keep the service going beyond the end of both founding projects in 2017, Oppla was set up as a non-profit organisation by Countryscape and the European Centre for Nature Conservation, a biodiversity expertise centre in the Netherlands.

The plan is to fund operations through involvement in research projects and the provision of services such as software development.

Paul Mahony of British environmental consultancy Countryscape commented:

“The research sector is great at producing really good information, but on the whole it’s not very good at communicating.”

“There’s a lot of great research out there, which doesn’t always reach the target audiences. So what we are trying to do with Oppla is to help increase the impact of research by bringing those outputs to new users.”

 “We looked at some of the existing platforms, and we also looked outside the research sector to draw inspiration from activities like e-commerce – sites like eBay and Amazon. eBay for instance manages huge amounts of information and makes it easy for people to contribute content, to sell things, to buy things, and so forth. And we thought, well, why can’t we apply similar principles?”

Determined to take a fresh look at the dissemination of environmental information and enable more people to access and use it, Mahony and his colleagues developed an atypical platform that combines features from very different settings.

Oppla includes a knowledge marketplace where members can make information or tools available to others, as well as a crowd-sourced information service. A matchmaking tool inspired by dating sites is also available, to help members find potential research or business partners.

More than 1 000 members have joined the Oppla community to date - half of these are from the research community, a quarter is composed of environmental SMEs and other businesses, and a further quarter is made up of a variety of organisations from the public sector and civil society.

Paul Mahony continued:

 “Oppla is mainly a platform for professionals, people who are interested in nature-based solutions or environmental science as part of their day jobs. But everyone is welcome to join and contribute to it.”

Positively disruptive

According to Mahony, Oppla’s unusual take on science communication appears to be gaining recognition, looking back on the six months that have gone by since the site went live.

“I think people see that it is still in its infancy, but that it has a lot of potential. I think they like the fact that we are trying to do things a bit differently. We are trying to be disruptive, but in a positive way – wipe the slate clean and completely start again, in some areas.”

Further features are about to be added and cooperation with IPBES is opening up opportunities for the platform to operate at a global scale.

Click here to visit the OPPLA Project website