Dataset Card: GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Dataset Card: GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Status: draft, awaiting maintainer review. Endpoint and license details checked against GBIF documentation on 2026-06-11. GBIF aggregates both marine and terrestrial records; filter to marine taxa for ocean use.
What it is
GBIF is an international, government-funded open-data infrastructure providing access to hundreds of millions of biodiversity occurrence records plus a unified backbone taxonomy. For ocean work it complements OBIS: broader taxonomic scope, with marine records filterable by taxon.
Access
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Provider | GBIF Secretariat |
| Docs | GBIF API reference |
| API base | https://api.gbif.org/v1 |
| Example endpoints | /occurrence/search, /species/match, /enumeration/basic/License |
| Auth | None for read/search. A free registered GBIF account is required only for initiating downloads (asynchronous occurrence download API) and authenticated POST operations. |
| Formats | JSON (API); Darwin Core Archive for downloads |
License and reuse
GBIF data is published under CC0 or CC-BY (and some CC-BY-NC); more than 82% of records are CC0 or CC-BY, which require no more than appropriate attribution. Licenses are per dataset — carry each record's license and citation through to downstream use. See GBIF terms of use. When you use a GBIF download, cite the download DOI it issues.
Fields
Records follow Darwin Core: accepted scientific name (matched to the GBIF backbone), decimal latitude/longitude, coordinate uncertainty, event date, dataset key, publishing organization, and license. The /species/match endpoint resolves names to the backbone taxonomy.
Limitations and ethics
- Strong sampling bias by geography and taxon; presence-only (absence is not implied).
- GBIF flags some sensitive-species records with obscured/generalized coordinates — respect that generalization; never attempt to de-obscure.
- Coarsen sensitive marine-species coordinates to regional granularity before publishing (ETHICS.md).
How it's used in the commons
Secondary occurrence source and taxonomy cross-check for species pages and guardians, complementing OBIS. Connector spec: integrations/gbif.md in the Ocean Intelligence System.
Sources (3)
Every claim in this artifact traces to one of the citations below. Anything that could not be sourced was left out.
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