Where Biodiversity Data Meets Those Who Need It Most: the NBFC Platform Is Live

Biodiversity loss is no longer a background risk. The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 has placed it at the centre of European policy, and Italy — through its National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) — has committed over €320 million to building the infrastructure that makes serious, large-scale biodiversity science possible. The ambition is clear: position Italy as a reference country for biodiversity research across the Mediterranean and southern Europe.

But ambition at that scale only lands if the data, the tools, and the people who need them can actually find each other.

That is exactly the problem the NBFC Platform was built to solve.

The Project: National Biodiversity Future Center

The National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC) is one of Italy’s five National Centres funded under PNRR Mission 4. It operates through a hub-and-eight-spokes structure, mobilising over 1,500 researchers from more than 50 Italian universities, research centres, and private partners — working across disciplines from genomics and ecology to artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology.
Its goals include organising and managing freely accessible databases for the international community, providing innovative tools for policymakers to quantify ecosystem services and decrease biodiversity loss, and increasing public awareness of the value of biodiversity for sustainable development.
The challenge was not a shortage of knowledge. It was a shortage of infrastructure to make that knowledge usable — at scale, across institutions, and for audiences that range from field researchers to project managers to policymakers.

The Platform: What It Does and How

The NBFC Platform, hosted and developed in partnership with CINECA, is the digital backbone of the entire consortium. It integrates genomic, ecological, and spatial data to enable advanced modelling, AI-assisted analysis, and predictive tools for biodiversity monitoring, restoration, and decision support.
Researchers can use the power of the supercomputer Leonardo to manipulate, gather and share data about different fields of biodiversity.
What makes it more than a data repository is the possibility to collect data into datasets and make them available to other scientists and/or the general public with the proper Group function.

Before the platform existed, a researcher at Spoke 4 – say, an ecologist tracking habitat fragmentation in the Po Valley – wanting to cross-reference their spatial distribution models with genomic diversity data collected by a team at Spoke 6 in Naples, would have faced a wall of friction. An email chain to track down the right contact. A file shared over a generic cloud drive, in a format that didn’t quite match. A week of back-and-forth to align taxonomic identifiers that each team had labelled differently. And at the end of it, no guarantee that the next update from Naples would ever find its way back.

None of that was negligence – it was simply the reality of coordinating more than 50 institutions without a shared infrastructure.

The NBFC Platform removes that wall entirely.

COMMpla’s Role

COMMpla was brought in to design and develop the frontend of the platform — the layer that sits between the user and the complexity underneath. CINECA built and exposed the APIs connecting each scientific service; Marco and Alessio made sure that a researcher could walk in, understand what was available, provide the inputs each service needed, and get results back in a form that actually made sense to them, without needing to know anything about what was happening under the hood.
In practice, that meant designing interfaces that guided the users through the right inputs, passing them cleanly to CINECA’s APIs, and then translating the responses into clear, readable outputs: taking what the services returned and presenting it in a way that a field ecologist, a data scientist, or a project coordinator could all use without friction.
Working alongside CINECA and the NBFC consortium, our team faced a challenge that goes beyond pure development: making a platform that serves an unusually wide range of users – from a citizen curious about local biodiversity (like a school student or a teacher, for example), to a researcher querying complex datasets – feel equally intuitive to all of them.
That meant designing a coherent look and feel that could carry scientific depth without intimidating non-expert users, and building a role-based access system that surfaces the right tools and data to the right people at the right time.

Charts, tables and data visualizations were not an afterthought: they were the primary way most users would ever make sense of what the platform offers. Getting those right, clear and readable was as important as any technical decision we made.

The result is a platform that makes Italy’s most ambitious biodiversity programme navigable, giving researchers, institutions, and citizens a single, coherent place to access data, run analyses, and understand what is happening to biodiversity across the country.

Why This Matters Beyond the Project

Research infrastructure at this scale is rarely built well. The gap between scientific ambition and usable tools is where most large-scale programmes quietly fail. What the NBFC Platform demonstrates is that investing in design and frontend quality is not a cosmetic choice: it is what determines whether a €320 million research programme actually reaches the people it was built for.

A platform that is hard to use is, in practice, a platform that does not get used.

One that is clear, accessible, and well-structured becomes the connective tissue of the entire initiative. This is a new piece of Italy’s digital science infrastructure, it’s one of the firsts and it is open.

Explore the Platform

The NBFC Platform is live and accessible. Whether you are a researcher affiliated with the NBFC consortium, an institution looking to connect with the network, or a data scientist interested in what Italy’s biodiversity infrastructure looks like up close — the platform is the place to start.

As we said previously in the article some functionalities are reserved to researchers and people working in the biodiversity’s field.
You can contact the platform to know more about at this link.

This article was written by Marco Carollo and Alessio Fabrizio, who are also the COMMpla developers who built the platform.

Italy is building one of Europe’s most ambitious biodiversity programmes. The NBFC Platform is where that work actually happens.