Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

A greener and naturalised city, where everyone can enjoy contact with nature close to home, enables us to achieve a better quality of life. Green urban spaces provide the city with core values, at the same time as enhancing biodiversity and resilience when dealing with emerging challenges such as climate change.

The Barcelona Biodiversity Atlas is a tool that helps us to display a large amount of information on these spaces. It is a map of the city of Barcelona divided up into 73 neighbourhoods that enables searches of the city’s trees, green-space plants, birds, butterflies and vertebrate animals among others, independently or together.

We can find out the scientific and common name of each species, see a short description and in some cases photographs or illustrations. Besides delving deeply into each of these layers, we can also explore the inter-relationship between them all and discover the total number of species that there are in each neighbourhood if we keep them all active.

All the information found in this Atlas is available to city residents in downloadable format, so this knowledge can be shared and new applications made from it.

It includes the following information:

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  Trees

  It features the more than 200,000 trees belonging to over 400 species that are found in the city’s streets and parks. They can be selected one by one. It also states which of these trees are listed as trees of local interest.

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  Plants

  It includes over 1,200 species that can be found in the city’s gardens, squares and green plots. There are shrubs, climbers, creepers and some herbaceous plants (except for grasses and seasonal plants).

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  Birds

  You can find out which birds nest in the city based on a study classifying them according to UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) squares.

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  Butterflies

  39 species found in the city based on an inventory conducted in certain parks. The data were compiled from 2015 to 2019 thanks to a citizen-science project based on the work of volunteers and in collaboration with benchmark institutions.

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  Vertebrates

  More than 30 species of mammals, amphibians and reptiles which are inventoried in certain green spaces.

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  Fish

  Over 100 different species of fish which live along our coast. Each beach has a space where you can check which species can be found there..

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  Naturalised ponds

  The vertebrates and invertebrates living in the city's most important naturalised ponds. A naturalised pond is one that is managed through fauna and flora, as an alternative to chemical management (chlorination).

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  Plant communities

  A plant community is defined as a group of plants living together on the same site, under specific environmental conditions and organised in a precise way in space and time. Some of these plant communities are known as CORINE habitats.

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  Degree of plant cover

  The normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used for determining the quantity, quality and development of vegetation and creates an image that shows the city’s plant cover as seen from the sky.