A wetlands legend and forest data up to 2025

Among the site map layers there is one that describes wetlands and water bodies at a detail of roughly thirty metres, classifying every point of the territory into one of eleven different categories. Until yesterday that layer was drawn on the map with distinct colours but never explained what they stood for: you saw a mosaic of blues, greens, reds and purples and had to guess, or give up reading it altogether. Now a legend appears below the map listing all eleven classes with their colour beside them: lakes, reservoirs, rivers, freshwater marshes and floodplains, swamp and flooded forests, coastal wetlands, brackish and saline wetlands, peatlands, intermittent wetlands and lakes, and finally the two classes that mark land that is wet for between twenty-five and fifty per cent, or between fifty and one hundred per cent. The distinction matters more than it may seem, because a peatland and an artificial reservoir are profoundly different things for biodiversity and for stored carbon, and until now they were flattened into the same indistinct drawing. The colours in the legend are exactly those used to draw the layer, not an approximation of them: the swatch you read matches the shade you see on the map. The tool that lets you click a point and read its value now uses the same correspondence too, so the name it returns for that point and the name you read in the legend always agree. In the same pass the layer was renamed "Wetlands and Water Bodies", because it also covers lakes, reservoirs and rivers and the previous name told only part of the story. All the labels are available in all five platform languages, so the legend reads in your own language with no terms left behind. You don't need to do anything to switch it on: open the layer and it is already there. You'll find it under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Map → Wetlands and Water Bodies.

The layer dedicated to tree cover loss shows on the map the places where trees have been lost, and it is one of the most used tools for understanding whether and when an area has been depleted. Its legend, however, told a different story: it presented a continuous scale from zero to one hundred with a percentage symbol, as if every point on the map indicated how much cover had been lost. That number exists nowhere in the data: the image overlaid on the map contains no percentages, it contains the year in which the loss occurred, drawn on a scale that runs from light for the most distant years to dark for the most recent ones. Anyone trusting the legend was therefore reading "eighty per cent" where the data said "two thousand and twenty" — plainly wrong information, and delivered with all the confidence of a number. The legend is now made of distinct swatches, one per year, with the colour taken from the very palette used to draw the layer: the shade you see on the map corresponds to a precise swatch, and that swatch carries the year. The change does not touch the data, which were correct before too, but it radically changes what you can draw from them: you can now tell at a glance whether a clearing is fifteen years old or from the last two, and those are two situations calling for entirely different responses. The percentage symbol and the continuous scale are gone, because they described nothing real. No action is required from you and nothing changes in how the layer looks on the map: the only difference is that the key at the bottom now matches the data. You'll notice it under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Map → Tree Cover Loss, as soon as you switch the layer on.

Every layer on the site map has an information panel listing where its data come from, and it is a part of the platform that is taken very seriously: those lines end up quoted in reports, shown to auditors and used to verify that an analysis rests on declared foundations. Over the months some of those lists had drifted away from what the layer actually uses, so we went through them one by one. The night-time surface temperature layer cited the same archive twice, once as the morning satellite and once as the afternoon one, and did not mention at all the other inputs that contribute to the result: the list now reports both correct archives and adds the optical imagery, the terrain model and the land cover actually used. The water bodies layer declared a global surface water archive, while for some time it has been built from open collaborative cartography and an international reference on seas: the attribution is now the real one, as is only fair towards those who make that data available. The layer describing urban thermal variability did not name land cover among its inputs, and now it does. We also corrected two units of measurement that had been left behind: plastic input to rivers is expressed in kilograms per year and not in tonnes, and the air pollution units have been realigned with those used in the calculation. Finally, the geological map available for sites in Greece now indicates the body that publishes it today and the scale actually used, instead of the previous name and a more detailed scale that does not correspond to it. No data have been recalculated and no map changes its appearance: the only difference is that what is written matches what is used. You'll find these lists under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Map, by opening the information panel of the active layer.

In a sensor's detail panel there is a check that queries the connectivity of the SIM installed in the device, and it serves to work out whether a silent unit has a network problem or something else. That check is voluntary by design: you start it with a button, you read the outcome and the result stays valid for a certain time. Once that time had passed, however, the check could restart on its own: simply switching to another browser tab and coming back, or the connection wavering for a few seconds, was enough for a new query to fire without anyone asking for it. In practice you saw a loading state appear and a figure update while you were looking at something else, on a check that by its nature is meant to be occasional and carried out one device at a time. There is a practical reason for keeping it under control, too: mobile operators limit how many consecutive queries they accept, so every unrequested check is one you might not have available at the moment you genuinely need it. Now the check only moves on an explicit click: it does not restart when you return to the window and it does not restart when the connection comes back. What you read stays what you asked for, until you ask again. Nothing has changed in how the panel looks or in the information it shows, and the button to run the check again is exactly where it has always been. You'll find it under XNatura → Monitoring → Census → Sensors, by opening a device's detail panel.

On our sites you'll find several forms for writing to us: asking for information, requesting a quote, receiving in-depth materials or signing up for an initiative. An automatic control designed to stop requests filled in by programs rather than by people had turned out to be too strict: it could classify as unwanted a message written by a real person, with the result that the form confirmed the submission but the request ended up elsewhere and was not handled together with the others. The problem was particularly insidious because it was invisible from both sides: you saw the confirmation and assumed everything was fine, while on the other end no signal arrived that something had been set aside. So we went back over the forms one by one: we removed the control that produced these errors entirely, and we verified that the security tick you complete really does travel along with the message, instead of getting lost on the way as happened in some cases. The result is that a request sent from any of our forms arrives whole and is picked up like all the others. Nothing at all changes for you in how you fill them in: same fields, same button, same on-screen confirmation. If you wrote to us in recent weeks and never received a reply, please do try again — this time the message gets through, and we are sorry for the wait. The fix is already active on every form and requires no action on your part.

Several map layers rest on global archives that are republished once a year, with one more year of data and with corrections applied to the previous ones, and we have moved the platform onto the most recent edition. Tree cover loss now covers one year more than before, reaching 2025, and its colour scale has been extended accordingly so that the newly added year has its own shade and its own entry in the legend. Forest canopy height change, which appeared in the selector as the 2000-2024 period, now covers the 2000-2025 range. Water persistence — that is, how often a surface turns out to be covered by water over the years — now reaches 2021 instead of 2020, and the layer label states it openly along with the full period. It may sound like a small thing, but the distance between the last available year and today is exactly what decides how current an analysis still is: one more year means capturing transformations the previous edition could not tell you about. Maps you have already generated remain valid and keep working as before, while new generations automatically pick up the extended series. We also updated the references in the information panels, so they point to the edition actually in use and not to last year's. One tip: with tree cover loss it is worth combining this update with the new per-year legend, because together they tell you not only where cover was lost but also how recently. You'll find the updated layers under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Map.

When you compose a report, the side panel gathers everything you can insert into the document and is organised into groups: maps, indicators, tables, regeneration and the placeholders to be filled in later. Until yesterday only the first two groups appeared open, while the other three were closed: anyone opening the panel saw a short list and could reasonably conclude that this was all the material available. In practice a sizeable part of the catalogue stayed invisible to anyone who did not already know it existed and had no reason to go looking for it behind three closed headings. Now every group opens expanded, so at first glance you see the whole set of what you can put into the document, from maps to placeholders. Each group can still be collapsed with a click when you want to shorten the list and concentrate on a single section, and the choice you make holds for as long as you work on that document. The categories inside the groups behave exactly as before, so there is nothing to relearn. The order of the groups has not changed either: if you already knew where to find a given block, you'll find it in exactly the same place. The change concerns only the panel's initial state and does not touch in any way the documents you have already created. You'll notice it under XNatura → Monitoring → Site → Report, as soon as you open the data panel.

There is a page gathering the sustainability projects carried out over the years: biodiversity oases, corporate case studies, urban and agricultural projects, pollinator protection and climate action, lined up year after year. Until yesterday that page could only be reached with a direct link or by going through search engines, which is a curious way to treat precisely the account of what has actually been done. Now it has the place it deserves in the navigation: you'll find it in the footer of every page and in the customer menu, next to the other entries describing our activities. The link is available in all five languages, so the entry also appears when you browse in English, French, German or Spanish. In the same pass we revised the page title and description, so that they say more clearly what you'll find inside instead of settling for a generic label. The most immediate benefit is for anyone wanting to show a colleague, a partner or a client what has been built, without having to hunt for the address or send them off to search for it. The page content has not changed and any links you had already saved keep working exactly as before. One suggestion: the page is organised by theme, so it is worth scrolling it starting from the topic your audience cares about.