GBIF API Guide

Overview

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by governments worldwide, aimed at providing open access to biodiversity data. GBIF aggregates hundreds of millions of species occurrence records from natural history collections, citizen science platforms, monitoring networks, and published literature across the globe.

The GBIF API provides programmatic access to this vast repository of biodiversity data. Researchers can search for species occurrences by taxonomy, geography, time period, and dataset. The API also supports taxonomic name matching, dataset discovery, and species profile lookups. It serves as a foundational resource for ecological research, conservation planning, biogeography, and environmental impact assessments.

Ecologists, conservation biologists, biogeographers, and environmental scientists rely on the GBIF API to retrieve georeferenced occurrence data for species distribution modeling, climate change impact analysis, invasive species tracking, and biodiversity hotspot identification. The data is freely available under open data licenses.

Authentication

No authentication required for read access. The GBIF API is publicly accessible without any API key or token. All search and retrieval endpoints are open. User authentication is only required for data publishing operations (creating datasets and uploading occurrences), which requires a GBIF account.

Core Endpoints

occurrence/search: Search Species Occurrences

Search for georeferenced biodiversity observation and specimen records across all GBIF-indexed datasets.

• URL: GET https://api.gbif.org/v1/occurrence/search
• Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
q	string	No	Full-text search query