The aim of the eBiodiversity portal (http://elurikkus.ut.ee/index.php?lang=eng) is to provide a comprehensive resource on Estonian biodiversity by bringing together scientific and citizen science datasets. The portal provides public access to a wide variety of taxon occurrence types including specimens in scientific collections, observations, sounds, images, videos, references in literature and DNA-based observations. Aggregated across all occurrence types, there are data on 31,041 species found in Estonia. Some species have very rich datasets while others are known to exist in Estonia only, based on references in the literature. The upgraded version of the portal has powerful GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data analysis and search engine as well as several base map layers.

The main target groups of the portal are scientists, teachers, schoolchildren, conservationists, and policy makers. The eBiodiversity portal is maintained by the University of Tartu Natural History Museum. Major data providers are the University of Tartu, the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Estonian Museum of Natural History, Tallinn Botanical Gardens, the Estonian Naturalists’ Society, the Estonian Ornithological Society, and Estonian birding clubs. In 2013 there were 101,966 unique visits to eBiodiversity from 106 countries, mostly from Europe and North America.

The eBiodiversity portal has been involved in the BalticDiversity project (http://balticdiversity.eu), sharing data with all partners involved. Also it has een involved in EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, http://www.eubon.eu) where our main role is to develop methods for citizen science and gap analyses of existing data sources.