Naturkompass
Naturkompass — Biodiversity Knowledge, Education & Citizen Science
A public-interest platform for gardens, urban green spaces and small-scale habitat restoration
Naturkompass connects open biodiversity knowledge with practical action, privacy-conscious participation and a clear public-interest mission.
Biodiversity action often does not fail because people do not care. It fails because practical orientation is missing. Many people want to support nature, wildlife and biodiversity, but they do not know which plants, structures and actions are truly meaningful.
Naturkompass closes this gap.
We translate biodiversity knowledge into practical action: from open scientific data, native species and ecological interactions to real habitat structures in gardens, school grounds and urban green spaces.
What Naturkompass does
Naturkompass is more than a biodiversity database. The platform connects knowledge, practical implementation and voluntary participation.
Making biodiversity knowledge accessible
We provide information on native plants, animals, habitats and ecological interactions. Our work is based on documented data sources, open licences and transparent attribution.
Our goal is not to hide biodiversity knowledge behind technical language. Our goal is to make it understandable and useful, so people can make better decisions for gardens, balconies, school grounds and public or urban green spaces.
Enabling practical action
Naturkompass helps people implement biodiversity-supporting measures in real places. This includes plant finders, habitat modules, garden structures, planting guidance, educational content and orientation tools for nature-friendly gardens.
The central question is always:
Which action creates real ecological value in this place?
Enabling voluntary participation
Private gardens and urban green spaces are often underrepresented in biodiversity knowledge systems, even though they can contribute to habitat creation, environmental education and ecological connectivity.
Naturkompass creates the basis for voluntary, anonymised and methodologically reviewed garden data to become more visible and useful in the future. This allows people not only to learn and act, but also to contribute to a better understanding of biodiversity in everyday landscapes.
Our public-interest contribution
Naturkompass follows a public-interest approach. We do not want biodiversity to remain abstract. We want to make it practical, understandable and actionable.
- We make biodiversity knowledge openly accessible.
- We promote native and site-appropriate species.
- We help people improve private and urban green spaces for biodiversity.
- We support environmental education, schools, municipalities and citizens.
- We create the basis for voluntary and anonymised garden biodiversity data.
- We only publish aggregated data when it is methodologically, scientifically and legally responsible to do so.
Naturkompass is therefore not just an information platform. It is a bridge between open knowledge, practical restoration and responsible participation.
Citizen Science: What we collect — and what we do not collect
For us, citizen science does not mean collecting as much data as possible at any cost. The key principles are voluntariness, clarity, privacy and scientific responsibility.
We may collect voluntarily submitted information about
- plants in the garden
- nature garden modules such as sand habitats, deadwood, wildflower meadows, ponds, hedges or dry habitat structures
- general garden characteristics
- wildlife and nature observations
- future standardised garden checks
These data can help us better understand which biodiversity structures are being created in private and urban green spaces, and how people support biodiversity in practice.
We do not publish
- names
- email addresses
- exact addresses
- precise GPS coordinates of private gardens
- sensitive locations of protected or disturbance-sensitive species
- unverified individual observations as hard scientific evidence
Private gardens remain private spaces. Naturkompass therefore follows a privacy-conscious and responsible approach.
Open data, open sources and responsibility
Naturkompass uses open biodiversity data not only to display information, but to help people take meaningful action.
The cycle is simple:
Open data flows into Naturkompass.
Naturkompass turns it into understandable practical knowledge.
People implement measures in gardens and urban green spaces.
Voluntary, anonymised and reviewed garden data may in the future flow back into open knowledge systems.
This creates a responsible exchange between science, practice and society.
Further information is available on our pages about data sources, privacy, terms and conditions and AI transparency.
What Naturkompass is not
Serious biodiversity work needs clear boundaries. That is why we state clearly what Naturkompass does not claim to be.
- Naturkompass is not an official mapping authority.
- Naturkompass does not replace professional ecological assessments.
- Naturkompass does not replace expert species identification.
- Naturkompass is not a platform for publishing sensitive species locations.
- Naturkompass is not a purely commercial sales tool.
- Naturkompass does not guarantee that every single measure automatically increases biodiversity.
Naturkompass provides orientation, knowledge and practical support. The ecological effect always depends on the site, implementation, maintenance and the interaction of many factors.
Our goal for Europe
Biodiversity does not stop at national borders. At the same time, species, habitats and ecological relationships differ between regions.
Our goal is to build a multilingual European platform that helps people in different countries better understand native species, local habitats and biodiversity-supporting garden structures — and turn that knowledge into practical action.
Naturkompass aims to make biodiversity-positive action scalable in everyday life: in private gardens, on balconies, in schools, in municipalities and across urban green spaces.
We do not claim to save Europe’s biodiversity alone. But we can help more people make better decisions, create habitats and make biodiversity visible in everyday landscapes.
In short
Naturkompass turns private gardens and urban green spaces into learning, restoration and biodiversity-observation spaces.
The platform combines open biodiversity data, accessible education, practical nature-garden implementation, privacy-conscious user participation and voluntary citizen-science data sharing under transparent responsibility.
Our goal is clear:
Biodiversity knowledge should not only be read.
It should create real impact outdoors.