Finnish biodiversity indicators (FBI) is an R language based service providing time series of abundance indices and related metrics for Finland. The input data for the indices are provided by the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility.
An HTTP API for access to the indicator data products is available for developers. The API is documented herehere.
Indicators are updated nightly from 12 to 8am and in random order. The update process checks FinBIF for new input data and updates all affected indices or as many as possible within the 8hr update process window.
Indicators are either single-taxon or multi-taxon. All indicators are calculated for the whole of Finland as well as separately for the North (Lappi, Kainuu and Pohjois-Pohjanmaa regions) and South (all other regions).
Single-taxon indicators track the average abundance across monitoring sites, relative to a base year. For example, if the base is the year 2000 and the indicator for 2003 is 0.8, then the average abundance across sites monitored in 2003 declined by 20 percentage points relative to the average abundance at sites monitored in the year 2000. Single-taxon indicators can be calculated using different models including TRIM and RBMS. Single-taxon indicators “belong” to a multi-taxon indicator but an individual taxa can constitute more than one single-taxon indicator each “belonging” to a different multi-taxon indicator. For example, Goldcrest (Regulus regulus) , belongs to both the Winter Bird indicator and the Forest Breeding Bird indicator and there are two corresponding single-taxon indicators for this species. Not all taxon that “belong” to a multi-taxon indicator contribute to the given indicator. For example, there is a single-taxon indicator for Eurasian Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) in winter that does not contribute the multi-taxon Winter Bird Indicator.
Multi-taxon indicators come in different forms. These include: the geometric mean of relative abundance across a set of taxa; the community temperature index for a set of taxa; and the total expected abundance for a taxon group. Not all multi-taxon indicators have single-taxon indicators that belong to them. Instead, multi-taxon indicators without single-taxon indicators can “reuse” the input of another multi-taxon indicator. For example, while there are no single-taxon indices that “belong” to the Winter Bird Community Temperature Index, this multi-taxon indicator is constructed from the taxa (and extra taxa) that fall under the Winter Bird indicator.