Nature Today; What is the business/communication potential of your scientific information?

During our presentation we will discuss our plans for setting up Nature Today. Nature Today aims to be an organization that will publish daily news from nature and environment from local to possibly global scale. The large and continuous ecological responses to changes in weather, climate and other environmental variables are relevant for and interesting to many people. We see possibilities for Nature Today to generate financial resources, institutional and societal support for ecological or environmental monitoring projects and their related research activities.

The ideas for Nature Today originate from the Dutch phenological network Nature's Calendar that we revived in 2001. Since then we set up a number of related citizen science networks that focus on, for example, hay fever, ticks & Lyme disease and mosquitoes. We have been very successful in generating public attention for our projects. The launch of the Dutch nature news website Natuurbericht.nl on which we publish two nature reports per day significantly helped in bridging the gap between scientists, journalists and the public.

It, however, remains a continuous struggle to find the required funding for continuation of our monitoring programs and the accompanying research activities. This will not be very different for most phenological networks, (long-term) monitoring networks or many scientific projects in general. One reason is probably that most scientists miss the ‘business gene' and we are not trained to actively commercialize and communicate our knowledge. It is probably even not done to think of business opportunities.

In the past year we participated in various business acceleration programs in the Netherlands. Besides becoming familiar with a whole new world we became even more convinced that many scientists have numerous opportunities to better connect their data, their models and their knowledge to the interest of the general public and specific target groups. More importantly, we think that many people, stakeholders and organizations are willing to pay for the information or to support the networks/projects in other ways. To make this happen Nature Today will: 1)Help environmental scientists and scientific organizations to present their data and knowledge in the right way (form, timing, language, etc.); 2)Connect scientists and journalists; 3)Offer scientists the network, platform and tools to get their data and knowledge to large amount of potentially interested people. 4)Help in identifying and realizing ‘business opportunities'.

We hope that we can inspire participants to consider involvement in Nature Today and that they are willing to help us in validating our assumptions.