New Plates to compose maps and data

We have introduced the new Compose mode inside the Plates section, sitting alongside the Explore mode you already know. In Compose you work on a real-format sheet — A4, A3, A2, 16:9 slide, square or custom, in landscape or portrait — exactly as you would on a plate meant for printing. Every element can be dragged and resized, with snapping to the grid, to the sheet margins and to the edges of the other elements, and with guides that appear while you move so everything lines up precisely. The arrow keys allow millimetre-level nudges and a delete key removes the selected element, so laying out a page stays quick even when you are chasing perfect alignment. Besides maps, charts, indicators and tables you can add the classic cartographic furniture: legend, scale bar, north arrow, numbered pins anchored to coordinates, and a title block with title, scale, date and revision. Measurements are expressed in millimetres rather than pixels, so what you see on screen is what you get when you download the plate. The Properties panel on the right lets you adjust the position, size, style, border, shadow and background of each element, as well as lock it, duplicate it, centre it or bring it to the front. The section also has a new address that matches its name: any links you had saved keep working and take you automatically to the updated page. You will find it all under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates, by picking the Compose mode at the top.

When you insert a chart or an indicator into a plate, it now arrives already connected to your site's real data. Previously the palette offered empty containers — bars, lines, pie — that you had to configure by hand by telling them where to read the numbers from, a technical step that slowed the work down and could easily go wrong. Now the entries come straight from the site data catalogue, the same one that feeds the reports: every map carries its own layer and every indicator its own source. Insert the natural habitat coverage indicator, for example, and you immediately get a live value, identical to the one the Explore mode shows for that same site. The catalogue holds about ninety entries across nine categories, which is why we added a search field that takes you to the map or indicator you need in a moment, with no long scrolling. The only elements left for you to fill in are the ones that are genuinely yours: text, title, image, title block and the cartographic furniture. Even the first plate you open starts from a real map instead of an empty frame waiting to be set up. Our tip is to use the search box with a keyword from the indicator you are after: it is the fastest way to build a complete plate. The palette opens from XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates, in the Insert tab of the right-hand panel.

So that you never have to start from a blank sheet, we have added four ready-made layouts you can pick at the moment you create a plate. Pressing "+ New plate" opens a window with a schematic preview of each template, plus the blank plate option if you prefer to compose from scratch. The first template is the Standard plate, with a large map, legend, scale bar, north arrow and title block already in place. The second, Map + analysis, puts the map on the left and, on the right, the legend together with the site's land-use indicators. The third, Dual map, sets land cover and NDVI side by side with their respective legends, handy when you want to compare two readings of the same territory. The fourth, Vegetation health (NDVI), is designed for woodland and forest managers and gathers current NDVI, the year-over-year change, a multi-date historical comparison and the multi-year trend in a single plate. Choosing a template always creates a new plate and never alters the one you are working on, so you can try several without risking the work you have already done. You will find the templates under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates, by pressing "+ New plate" in the plates column.

Every plate you compose can be downloaded through a new dialog that lets you choose calmly how to export it. You can pick the file format: multipage PDF ready for print, PNG with no quality loss, or a lighter JPG that is easy to attach to an email or drop into a presentation. You can decide whether to export only the plate you are working on or every plate in the document, which are laid out in the same order you arranged them in the left-hand column. The resolution is up to you: 96 DPI for screen, 150 DPI for good quality and 300 DPI for professional print. Before the download starts, the dialog tells you how many real pixels you will get and roughly how heavy the file will be, so you know in advance when you are asking for a very large image and never get the feeling that the button is stuck. While the export runs, a progress indicator shows which plate it has reached and you can cancel at any moment. The PDF respects the real size of every single plate, so even a document mixing different formats prints correctly. There is also a transparent background option, useful when you want to layer the plate over another document. You will find the download under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates, from the Download button in the toolbar.

The plates you compose are now kept on the platform, so you can pick the work up again at any time and from any device. Saving is automatic: shortly after each change the document is stored, and an indicator next to its name tells you whether it is saved, whether saving is in progress, or whether something did not go through, so you always know where you stand. Should the connection drop, the platform retries by itself once it is back, without you having to redo anything. Every document has a name you can edit and a status, Draft or Completed: when you are done you mark it as completed and, if you need to, you reopen it for further edits. There is also a history that keeps previous versions and lets you restore one, which helps when you want to go back to a layout you liked better. The "My plates" list gathers every document for the site, and from there you can open one, create a new one or delete the ones you no longer need. Reload the page and you will find the plate exactly as you left it, with every element in place. You will find the list under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates, from the "My plates" menu at the top.

In the Census we have added a small marker that makes it clear which perimeter is the site's default one. A star now appears next to the perimeter set as the reference, the same symbol we already use in the analysis history, so the platform's visual language stays consistent from one section to the next. Before, you had to remember or check elsewhere which perimeter was the reference one, whereas now you recognise it at a glance in the list. This helps most when a site has several perimeters surveyed at different times and you want to work out quickly which one counts as official. The star is purely informative: it does not change which survey opens first, which is still the most recent one, and it does not alter the data shown in any way. We also made sure the symbol is announced by screen readers, so the information is accessible to people navigating with assistive technology. You do not need to do anything to switch it on: it is already there in the list of perimeters. Go to XNatura → Monitoring → Census and look next to the perimeter names.

In the Overview, inside the pillar dedicated to Regeneration, a new card now shows how many different species have been planted across your sites. Until yesterday you could see how many trees had been planted, but not how many different botanical species made up that planting, which is in fact the most useful figure when you want to describe the richness of an intervention. Species variety is one of the most immediate signs of a well-designed regeneration project, because a mixed woodland is more resilient than a monoculture. The card appears when the plantings concern your own sites, so the number shown always refers to what is directly under your control. Hovering over the card gives you a short explanation of what is being counted, to avoid misreadings of the figure. We also removed a value from the section footer that repeated the same information, cutting duplication and making the section cleaner to read. The result is an overview that is quicker to show to colleagues, stakeholders and partners. You will find it under XNatura → Overview, in the card dedicated to Regeneration.

We have fixed a Census behaviour that forced an extra step every time you opened the section. Until yesterday, on entering, the year selector reset itself to the oldest available survey, so you were faced with data from past years and had to remember to change the year every time to see the current picture. The problem was particularly sneaky because the data shown was correct for the selected year: nothing signalled that you were not looking at the latest survey. The Census now always starts from the most recent survey, which is the most useful choice in the vast majority of cases. When two surveys share the same date, the more recent version of the two is shown, avoiding unpredictable results. The same rule has been applied when the Census is displayed in compact form inside other pages, so the behaviour is identical everywhere on the platform. You can of course still pick any historical year manually from the selector, just as before. You will find the fix already active under XNatura → Monitoring → Census.

We have solved a problem that made the download button disappear from the map in one specific situation. When you switched on the true-colour satellite view, the button that lets you download the layer image did not appear at all, while it was there as usual with the other layers and with the high-resolution version of the same view. The effect was doubly confusing, because it looked as though that view had deliberately been made non-downloadable, when in fact a setting was simply missing. The button is now available with the true-colour view active too, and produces the matching image exactly as it does for the other layers. You can therefore export the site's satellite view and use it in a report, in a presentation or as the base for a plate. No action is needed on your side: the fix is already active on every site. If you had given up on downloading that view in the past, do give it another try. You will find it under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Map, with the true-colour satellite view active.

In the Storytelling chapter dedicated to the territory, the map behaved unnaturally when it opened. It automatically selected the first project in the list, so a detail card appeared without you having clicked anything and, when there was more than one project, the map zoomed too close to a single point instead of showing the whole picture. The result was a chapter that started in an odd state, hard to make sense of for anyone opening it for the first time and not very effective to present to an audience. The map now opens with no active selection and with a framing that includes every point in the story, giving you the overview of the project straight away. The detail card only appears when you click a point on the map or pick a search result, in other words when you have asked for it. That makes the narrative tidier and more predictable, both while you prepare it and when you share it with others. No action is required: the fix is already active in every language. You will find it under XNatura → Overview → Storytelling, in the chapter about the territory.

We have sorted out two Regeneration behaviours that made pages full of content look empty. The first concerns the map: anyone signing in with a company profile was always taken to the adopted-sites tab, even when that tab was empty and all the sites were in the other one, giving the impression of having landed in the wrong place. The same rule now applies to every profile: on opening, the tab holding more sites is shown, that is, the one where there is actually something to look at. The second concerns the site description: if a site had no point on the map, the whole section with the descriptive text vanished, and whoever curates the content could not even write the description. The section now stays visible without a map: the text takes the full available width and the box adapts to the length of the content, with no unsightly empty space. This means non-geolocated sites can be described and presented properly too. Both fixes are already active and require nothing from you. You will find them under XNatura → Regeneration.

We have fixed three details that made the community and sharing pages feel less cared for. The first concerns adoptions: when there was no adoption in the selected period, the page showed nothing and looked broken, while the data simply existed in other periods. An explicit message now tells you there are no adoptions for that range, so you immediately understand that changing the period brings your data back. The second concerns the presentation videos: on iPhone and iPad the preview stayed black until you pressed play, while on computers it displayed correctly; the thumbnail is now visible on every device. The third concerns the sharing images: the badge accompanying the project story showed a hand-rebuilt logo instead of the official 3Bee one, both on screen and in the image you download to publish. The real logo is now used in both cases, so what you share on social media or attach to a presentation looks professional. We also refined the graphics of the empty state and improved a few German phrasings. You will find it all under XNatura → Overview → Adoptions.

We have made composing plates far more comfortable by working on three practical aspects of the daily job. The first is the action history: you can now undo and redo every change, both from the toolbar buttons and with the usual keyboard shortcuts, and continuous actions such as a drag or a stretch of typing are grouped into a single step, so an undo does not walk you back character by character. The second is zoom: the plate now fits the window when you open it instead of starting off small in the middle of the screen, and holding Ctrl or Cmd while you turn the wheel zooms while keeping the point under the cursor still, exactly as in graphics software. Trackpad pinch works too, while the plain wheel keeps scrolling the work area as before; one click on the zoom percentage refits the plate to the window. The third is a direct bridge from the Explore mode: from the layer you are looking at you can choose "Use in plate" and find it right away as an already-linked map frame, with the view switching automatically to Compose. That removes the manual step of hunting for the same layer again inside the palette. Together, these three additions make building a plate much smoother, especially on large screens. You will find them under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates.

A plate's legend is no longer written by hand: it reads the layer of the map frame it is linked to directly. For gradient layers, such as the vegetation health index or the surface temperature, it draws the colour ramp with the real minimum, maximum and unit of measure, so anyone looking at the plate immediately understands the scale of the values. For land cover we chose to list only the classes actually present in the site, with their colour and matching hectares, instead of printing the whole theoretical nomenclature: a site with two or three classes should not look as though it contains rice paddies and airports. If you change the map frame's layer, the legend updates by itself with no further work on your side. We also removed the default value that used to appear on the scale bar, because it was an indicative number that did not necessarily match the printed map: the distance label is now a field you fill in when you know the correct reference. On a plate someone might measure with a ruler, we prefer no number at all to an unverified one. It is a transparency choice that makes plates usable in technical and reporting contexts too. Legend and scale bar are inserted from XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Plates, in the Cartography group of the Insert tab.

We have revisited a few Overview wordings that were causing doubts, gathering the reports that came in through the platform. The mean species abundance indicator now states explicitly the baseline the biodiversity loss is measured against, namely an intact ecosystem: the number was correct before, but the comparison stayed implicit and its significance could be misread. The entry about plantings on your sites is now called "Trees planted", a more natural and understandable phrase than the previous technical wording. The tooltip on the sensor count now spells out that the number also includes the smart hives installed on the sites, not just the field environmental sensors, removing the impression that the total did not add up. In the block dedicated to reporting standards we enlarged the Sustainable Development Goal logos, which were practically unreadable at their previous size. These are small changes, but they cut down the questions and let you present the data with more confidence. All these wordings have been updated in all five platform languages. You will find them under XNatura → Overview.

Downloading a layer image from the map is now a sturdier and quicker operation. Until yesterday, the very first request of the day on a layer could take a long time and show an error message, even when the image was in fact being produced correctly: an annoying behaviour that led people to retry without knowing whether something had broken. Now, as soon as you open the download panel, the platform prepares the image generation chain in advance, so by the time you press the button the work is already under way. If the first request does not make it in the expected time, it is automatically repeated once and finds the image already waiting, without showing you any error. The preparation is refreshed periodically while you keep the panel open, so even a long working session stays responsive. Downloading several layers in parallel is still possible, and each one handles its own retry independently. You do not need to do anything to benefit from the improvement: it is already active on every site. You will find layer downloads under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Map, from the tool panel on the right.