Global Biodiversity Information Facility

GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments. It provides open access to data about all types of life on Earth, supporting scientific research and policy-making by offering biodiversity-related evidence. The network includes participating countries, organizations, and data publishers, and its data is used in scientific studies published in peer-reviewed journals at a rate of more than four papers every day. GBIF supports four classes of datasets: resources metadata, checklist data, occurrence data, and sampling-event data. The Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) is a free, open-source software tool used by organizations to publish biodiversity data, and a data validator tool helps check datasets prior to publication, offering specific recommendations for improvement and cleaning. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to datasets to ensure proper citation and credit for data publishers. GBIF’s data processing infrastructure includes crawling, fragmenting, normalizing, and interpreting data from various sources, and it offers hosted portals to support biodiversity data use and engagement at national, institutional, regional, and thematic scales. Collaborating with geneticists, GBIF displays DNA-derived data to offer a more complete picture of life on Earth, and its Sequence ID tool queries taxonomy reference databases for Fungi, Animals, Bacteria, and Archaea. Data is available for download in tab-delimited CSV and Darwin Core Archive formats. GBIF’s strategic framework aims to deliver enhanced value and coherence through continued innovation and community engagement. Its data is used to assess extinction risks, identify and conserve key biodiversity areas, and monitor invasive species. The network includes hundreds of institutions that publish biodiversity data and thousands of volunteers who participate through citizen science programs. GBIF’s data informs decision-making and policy, including contributions to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and is accessible through various tools and APIs, including rgbif for R and pygbif for Python. Additionally, GBIF’s data is used in cloud computing environments like Microsoft Planetary Computer, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.