GBIF Species Occurrence Feed Screensaver

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is an international research infrastructure, funded by governments, that makes data about the occurrence of life on Earth openly available. It does not collect specimens itself. Instead it aggregates records from publishing organisations around the world: natural history museums, herbaria, research projects, monitoring schemes and citizen science platforms. A single record, called an occurrence, states that a given organism was observed or collected at a place and time.

Each entry shows a scientific name, a kingdom (animals, plants, fungi and so on) and the country where it was recorded. GBIF’s basis of record field says what kind of evidence stands behind an occurrence, such as a human observation, a preserved specimen in a collection, a machine observation like a photograph or audio recording, or a fossil specimen. A museum specimen could have been collected a century ago, so the event date gives when the organism was recorded, not when the record was entered.

Records are only as good as their source. Names are matched to a reference taxonomy that reconciles competing classifications, and GBIF’s own guidance warns that publishers do not always fill in fields such as basis of record correctly, so data should be checked before use. Coverage is also uneven, because records depend on where observers and institutions are active.