Global Biodiversity Information Facility

https://www.gbif.org/

Description

GBIF is a global, open-data network whose aim is to make biodiversity data (primarily species occurrence data) freely and universally available. Through GBIF, many institutions worldwide--such as museums, universities, research organizations, and citizen-science initiatives--publish biodiversity data following common standards, so users can access them via a single location. GBIF's mission is to mobilize, standardize and disseminate biodiversity information that can be used in the realms of research, conservation, environmental management, policy and sustainable development.

What type of data is available: The majority of data on GBIF is species occurrence data. These are records that a certain taxon was observed at a particular place and time. Sources include specimen collections from museums or herbaria, wildlife monitoring programs, citizen-science observations, published observations, etc. Also available on GBIF are taxonomic checklists (i.e., lists of known species in a given region), sampling-event data (datasets where occurrences come from structured sampling events such as monitoring surveys, and may include extra information such as sampling method, sampling effort, and sometimes abundance counts), and specimen data (data associated with physical specimens in natural history collections such as collector, collection date, etc.).

Metadata

Metadata Component	Description
Theme	Distribution of species worldwide
Source	Varied (museum/herbaria collections, field surveys, monitoring programs, citizen science, etc)
Purpose	To provide a centralized location from which interested users may access information on biodiversity, chiefly species occurrences.
Time Frame	19th century - present
File Type	Species occurrence
File Format	.csv
Structure	One occurrence per row, including scientific name, coordinates, and date of recording
Projection and coordinate system	WGS84
Extent	Global
Resolution or scale	Point or event-based occurrence (for older records, location information may be coarse)

Important Considerations

GBIF is good for mapping species distributions, temporal trend analyses (change in occurrence over time, or expansions/contractions of range), and all forms of ecological or biogeographic studies, especially when the occurrence data is linked with environmental data (such as climate, land use, etc). It's important to understand the limitations of the data, however, which include that this is presence-only data (absence of data does not mean that a species is absent from that area), and that the data are not collected under a single, standardized sampling design. Data can differ drastically in terms of spatial accuracy, temporal resolution, sampling effort, etc., and there can be gaps in the data (particularly, for example, for older specimens which were collected prior to GPS).

Downloading Instructions

Data can be found at https://www.gbif.org/dataset/search, or for specifically occurrence data at https://www.gbif.org/dataset/search?type=OCCURRENCE. Go to https://techdocs.gbif.org/en/data-use/ for information on download formats (explanation of what data is in the files), and how to important into QGIS, ArcGIS and Excel.

Restrictions on Use

Each dataset on GBIF is published under one of a few standardized open licenses, and you are free to use them for your capstone projects. GBIF provides recommended citation guidelines for citing data retrieved from GBIF (https://www.gbif.org/citation-guidelines). See https://www.gbif.org/terms/data-user for the full data user agreement.