The Global Environment Facility last month endorsed an ambitious project to construct a Brazilian national biodiversity information system. This will be tailored to the needs of key decision-makers in the government and in the private sector (see http://go.nature.com/OYiHOj).

Brazil contains roughly 60% of the Amazon rainforest and 15–20% of the world's biodiversity. But the country holds only 1% of the scientific data stored in biological collections worldwide. This poor documentation is holding back efforts to plan effective conservation strategies and to manage valuable biological resources.

The proposed new system will differ from existing initiatives, which are designed mainly to serve the scientific community. It will be coordinated by the government's Ministry of Science and Technology, and will be built in consultation with policy-makers, planners and other stakeholders. A range of visualization and analysis tools will allow decision-makers to combine the new biodiversity information with other socio-economic and physical databases. The information will be freely available, which should increase accountability and usability.

Brazil's deforestation has been decreasing; the economy is growing; and there is the political will to tackle the country's pressing environmental problems. The progress of the new initiative will be watched across the developing world, where other biodiversity-rich nations face many of the same issues of poor data availability and multiple threats to biodiversity.