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
This card records GBIF as a candidate source for occurrence and taxonomy work in the commons. Blue Life Commons does not currently publish a GBIF connector here. Treat an implementation as unavailable until its code, tests, provenance, license handling, and coordinate safeguards are publicly inspectable.
Sources (3)
Every claim traces to one of the citations below. Anything that could not be sourced was left out.
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