Guidance

Access environmental data

Check open environmental data and use it in your own applications.

• From: Environment Agency and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
• Published: 7 April 2014
• Last updated: 31 March 2023 — See all updates

Applies to England

• Guidance for Northern Ireland
• Guidance for Scotland
• Guidance for Wales

The Data Services Platform is provided by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and its agencies.

It supports open access to environmental data for:

• the public
• partner organisations, their staff and contractors

The platform provides:

• open data feeds
• application programming interfaces (APIs), built on linked data, which are aimed at system and application developers
• Defra group’s own applications, built using the APIs and linked data, which show environmental data for various topics

If you are a partner or a Defra group contractor you can register through the platform to access additional data. You can also ask questions about the data and web services through its forum.

About the data

Under its Open Data Strategy Defra and its agencies are increasing the range of data they provide.

All the data is also listed on data.gov.uk.

Published 7 April 2014

Last updated 31 March 2023 + show all updates

1. 31 March 2023

   Added links to environmental data for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Updated the overview of the Data Services Platform to say that it provides open data, APIs built on linked data, and Defra group's own applications based on the data.

2. 13 April 2018

   Updated link to environment.data.gov.uk

3. 7 April 2014

   First published.