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Introduction

NatureScot, the Scottish government’s national nature agency, works to protect the country’s natural environment and provides advice and consent for anyone wishing to develop in protected areas. The agency enlisted Informed Solutions as part of a government-funded initiative to help it apply artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to extract critical value from distributed data sources to more effectively manage protected areas. The resulting commercially available platform is called InformedDECISION™. The platform has demonstrated the potential to cut NatureScot’s total application review times by 50 percent and provide better access to information, allowing staff to focus on high-value protected area cases.

Challenges

NatureScot is a government agency with responsibility for the protection of Scotland’s natural environment. At a national level, this involves developing environmental policies that are designed to support government-level initiatives aimed at increasing biodiversity and meeting net-zero goals. At a regional level, it involves supporting sustainable land use by providing advice and permission for the activities of local authorities, developers, estate managers, and landowners to preserve and maintain Scottish nature.

The agency was finding that the number and complexity of applications for land use changes were increasing with staff struggling to keep up with the time required to resolve each one. Each request meant lengthy investigation times because critical data was located in different places in multiple formats—both structured and unstructured—across on-premises legacy systems, making it time-consuming to find the information required to support decision-making.

Solutions

To solve these issues, NatureScot wanted to harness innovative technology and data science, and needed a partner with AI expertise to help it develop a solution that would best meet its needs. NatureScot chose Informed Solutions, which proposed an innovative, cloud-based, AI-enabled information service. The proposed platform included the latest advances in AI, data analytics, mapping, satellite, and earth observation imagery to simplify and resolve complex customer queries and provide advanced support for Nature Scot’s case officers to support decision making on planning applications across the whole of Scotland. Informed Solutions created a new platform called InformedDECISION™. The platform was developed iteratively, engaging NatureScot’s customers and staff in a user-centered design, research and development process, explicitly considering pain points to ensure the service addressed all issues to speed decision making.

Results

With NatureScot able to do more with the same resources, it has now rolled out its new platform across Scotland with the same number of internal staff. “It’s not always easy to achieve wholesale change in a governmental organization—with Informed Solutions, we’ve seen that change. It’s a massive achievement and one we’re hugely proud of,” concludes Dave Genney – Protected Areas and Surveillance Manager.

Benefits
● 50% expected reduction in casework review time
● 50% estimated decrease in application review times
● 25% anticipated reduction in pre-application processing times
● 150,000 data items ingested from various sources
● Informed DECISION™ sits on top of distributed legacy data stores, allowing NatureScot to extract decision-grade value and insight without the need to upgrade systems.

“Previously, we spent lots of time searching different systems to make decisions, working with Informed Solutions, we can make better sense of information, so our experts can make a positive difference to the environment and on climate change.”

NatureScot InformedDECISION
Protected Areas and Surveillance Manager - NatureScot

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