The UNPplus Tool Finder: Helping Cities Navigate Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Monitoring
Cities working on Urban Nature Plans face a paradox: there are more tools available for biodiversity and ecosystem service monitoring than ever before, yet finding the right one for a specific planning context remains genuinely difficult. The landscape is fragmented, terminology is inconsistent across tools, and there is little guidance on which tools suit different datasets, expertise levels, or stages in the planning process. The result is that practitioners either default to familiar tools regardless of the fit, or spend significant time searching for better tools without confidence in what they find.
The UNPplus Tool Finder was developed to address this directly. Built as part of the Urban Nature Plans + (UNP+) project under Work Package 2, it brings together 276 assessed tools for biodiversity and ecosystem service monitoring into a single, navigable resource, which is structured around how cities actually work, not how researchers categorise tools.
The Tool Finder asks users just two questions: what outputs do they need, and what input data do they have? From there, it directs them to the most relevant tool category and presents all matching tools. Users can then narrow these further by the expertise level a tool requires (and the level which the user has) and by where they are in the planning process, making it useful for teams with very different capacities and at different stages of UNP development.
The resource exists in two formats: a filterable Excel database for offline use, and an interactive R Shiny app available online. The categorisation of tools and the decision logic behind the Tool Finder were shaped directly by Lighthouse and Greening Cities partners from Barcelona, Paris, Mannheim, Burgas, and Belgrade. City partners ranked the most important elements of the decision process, responded to structured questions about how the tool fit their planning workflows, and provided open feedback that prompted a significant redesign between versions. The result is a tool built around real capacity constraints and planning realities, not academic assumptions.
The UNPplus Tool Finder is freely available and has the potential to become a living resource, with room to evolve as more cities engage with it and new tools emerge. Rather than adding to an already crowded landscape, it makes what already exists findable.
Access the tool: https://lindsi.shinyapps.io/unp-tool-finder/
Author: Lindsi Seegmiller, PhD - Geospatial research scientist at Lund University, Sweden, with 15+ years of experience at the intersection of GIS, climate adaptation and environmental sustainability.
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