Use cases

​NaturaList is flexible enough to power a wide range of biodiversity data projects. The following are the most common project types - but because NaturaList imposes no constraints on what the "taxonomy" or the additional data represent, the platform can be adapted well beyond formal biological inventory. The exact type of data available will always depend on what data the author included in the project.

Regional taxonomic inventories and status databases

The primary use case: a continuously updated inventory of all species of a country, island, protected area, or biome, filterable by taxonomy or any data the author includes. Some useful examples may contain extablishment means, habitat, distribution or any other, regional distribution maps, or pre-taxon links to external biodiversity databases such as herbaria or museum online systems.

Natural history collection catalogues and type occurrence indices

A museum or herbarium publishing its holdings as a browsable occurrence catalogue, linking each record to taxonomy, collection or label data, institutional accession, and georeferenced coordinates. Type occurrence indices are a focused subset of this same setup.

Biodiversity surveys and monitoring datasets

Occurrence datasets from repeated surveys - transects, point counts, vegetation plots - where occurrence rows are georeferenced occurrence records and taxon rows summarise species-level attributes, enabling both levels of analysis in the same interface.

Identification tools

Dual-system identification capabilities driven directly by the spreadsheet. Multi-access keys emerge automatically: when authors include trait data (like morphology or phenology) and enable them as filters, they instantly provide users with a dynamic multi-access key. For more guided identification, authors can deliberately configure traditional step-by-step single-access keys. End-users can seamlessly combine these systems - narrowing candidates via trait filters and confirm with a single-access key.

Ethnobotanical and ethnozoological databases

Documentation of plant or animal uses, vernacular names, and associated cultural knowledge structured around a folk or indigenous taxonomy. Multilingual support allows the same dataset to serve community members and researchers simultaneously.

Educational guides and comparative trait databases

Interactive species guides for schools, botanical gardens, or nature reserves - with photos, audio, maps, phenology, and identification keys, designed for offline use. The same structure works for comparative morphological or ecological datasets where the trait matrix and filters allow researchers to explore patterns across a clade or identify data gaps.

Non-biological catalogues

Because NaturaList imposes no constraints on what the "taxonomy" represents, it can be adapted for any hierarchically organised inventory - archaeological typologies, linguistic phylogenies, folk classification systems - where browsable, filterable, mobile-friendly navigation adds value.

Ready to build?

Start with the Author Guide to understand how the spreadsheet drives every aspect of your project.