By Jonathan Porter, Technical Director, Oppla
When we launched Oppla 10 years ago, we had a vision to create an open platform for nature. We wanted to help people share knowledge about protecting nature and its benefits that humanity depends on. We also wanted to ensure that the valuable knowledge created by research and innovation is not lost when project-funded web platforms close.
The team developing the Oppla platform is still driven by that mission to increase access to knowledge, and we now have a platform that can realise our vision. In this article, I’ll highlight some of our key developments and plans for future improvements.
The original ideas for Oppla were created in two European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) projects that started in 2011: OPERAs and OpenNESS. Both projects focused on operationalising ecosystem services and worked together to create a shared, open platform. This became Oppla (Open platform) which launched in September 2016.
As nature-based solutions grew through the 2010s as a key concept for communicating the benefits of nature, we increased Oppla’s focus on this topic. Oppla provided the underlying case study database for the ThinkNature project, using the first version of the Oppla API, which was developed through the ConnectingNature project. In 2019, the European Commission Directorate General for Research and Innovation officially recognised us as the EU Nature-Based Solutions Knowledge Repository. The NeworkNature project continued this legacy, establishing its web platform on Oppla and providing access to an existing body of case studies and knowledge resources.
In June 2025, we launched Oppla 2.0 - a complete rebuild of the platform. We started from scratch with a new system architecture, with particular innovations around shared group content. Our new platform allows us to host websites for individual projects such as A-Track and CircHive, while also creating shared spaces that bring their knowledge together.
Alongside these full websites, any project or knowledge holder working for nature can create a free group on Oppla to share knowledge and connect with others.
Content from these websites and groups can be shared with other groups across Oppla or through dedicated portals that bring together particular communities and areas of knowledge, such as NetworkNature for nature-based solutions, and RewildingKnowledge for science related to rewilding.
Through this connected web platform, we can connect disciplines and speed up the transition towards a nature positive future.
We believe this innovative approach to sharing information encourages knowledge exchange and collaboration. We have built Oppla to be as open and inclusive as possible, and all knowledge holders are welcome in the Oppla community.
Importantly, we don't own the content that you upload to Oppla. It remains yours. We share it under an open licence so that others can use and share that knowledge, as long as they attribute the source.
We continue to test and extend the Oppla platform. This year, we released our new Resource Finder across all our groups. In August, we released Oppla 3 and we've already had five new feature releases since then.
Another key development this year is building a web platform that the new Science Service for Biodiversity could use to manage knowledge requests and share knowledge between science, policy and society. Content uploaded to Oppla will be made freely available to the future Science Service and we will help our community members to migrate to the future service. You can share your knowledge today, knowing that it has the potential to contribute to future policy impact.
We recognise that language is a barrier. Our web statistics are skewed to countries used to working in English. We are developing a Spanish version of Oppla in partnership with Instituto Humboldt and we're launching a glossary next year to aid machine translation of technical terms.
The next 10 years will be pivotal for the future of humanity. We want Oppla to support the recovery of our places, our landscapes and our planet.
Get in touch if you share our vision for more open knowledge for nature by email to jonathan at oppla dot eu or log in to your Oppla account and leave a comment below.
