Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
When planning research, it is not always necessary to start by collecting your own data. For many research questions, existing published data can be used either as a standalone source for analysis or as a complement to your own results.. In the field of biodiversity, one of the most important resources is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
GBIF is an international infrastructure providing open access to biodiversity data from around the world. It brings together data from research institutions, museums, natural history collections, monitoring programmes, and other sources (currently more than 123,000 datasets worldwide). For researchers, it can serve as a useful starting point, for example, when looking for information on the occurrence of a particular organism.
What Types of Data Can You Find in GBIF?
GBIF encourages data providers to publish information as comprehensively as possible so that it can be used to address a wide range of research questions. However, not all datasets contain the same level of detail. They may differ in both scope and the type of information they provide. GBIF therefore distinguishes several classes of datasets.
- Occurrence data: These are often the most relevant data for researchers. They record the occurrence of a particular organism in space and time. The data can originate from a wide variety of sources, including records of specimens and fossils held in natural history collections, observations from field research or citizen science, as well as data obtained using camera traps or remote sensing methods.
- Sampling-event data: These datasets are typically quantitative data collected using standardised protocols for measuring and monitoring biodiversity. Examples include vegetation transects, bird counts, or sampling in freshwater and marine environments. Compared with a simple occurrence record, these data may provide more information about how the survey or sampling was conducted..
GBIF brings together data from different countries and time periods and makes it possible to use them jointly. This can, for example, enable researchers to examine species occurrence across broader geographical areas or investigate changes over time.
GBIF also includes data sources from the Czech Republic, such as data from the herbarium collections of Masaryk University and the Mycological Collection of the National Museum..
Searching for Data
Searching GBIF is relatively straightforward. You can search by a particular organism, taxonomic group, geographical area, time period, or data source. In addition to individual records, you can browse entire datasets and their providers.
You can explore the portal without registering. However, to download data through GBIF, you need to create a user account and sign in.
The data are provided in a standardised structure, which facilitates further processing. This does not mean, however, that they can be used directly in an analysis without first being checked. As with other secondary data, it is important to consider their provenance, completeness, geographical and temporal coverage, as well as possible duplicates and errors.
Searching for datasets related to a selected organism (in this case, Ips typographus):
After searching for a selected organism, clicking on its name displays information about its distribution and the relevant datasets:
What to Consider When Using the Data
More attention than the search itself is usually required when cleaning downloaded data: filtering them, checking their quality, and interpreting them correctly. For larger analyses, it is therefore worth becoming familiar not only with searching the GBIF website but also with the documentation of individual datasets and information about their provenance.
A large number of available records does not automatically mean that the data are representative. Some regions, species, or time periods may be very well covered, while data for others may be almost entirely absent. Moreover, different datasets may have been created using different methods and for different purposes. These differences need to be taken into account when combining datasets and interpreting the resulting analyses.
Example of data download options:
Example of data downloaded from GBIF:
How Are GBIF Data Used in Research?
You can find inspiration for your own research directly on the GBIF portal. The Data Use section presents scientific studies that use data made available through the infrastructure. Selected studies are also featured in the annual GBIF Science Review.
Example of Use
One example is a study focusing on the diversity of wild bees in Europe. The authors combined open data from GBIF with other, partly non-public data sources. After cleaning and validating the data, they obtained almost three million occurrence records covering approximately 1,500 bee species across Europe.
Such a large dataset made it possible to analyse both taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity and to investigate geographical and environmental patterns. The results showed, for example, higher species richness in southern Europe. At the same time, the study highlighted substantial differences in the quality and coverage of individual data sources, as well as insufficient sampling across large parts of Europe.
This example illustrates both the opportunities and the limitations of secondary data. GBIF can provide researchers with access to quantities of data that would be unrealistic to collect through their own fieldwork. At the same time, the size of a dataset alone does not guarantee that it is representative. Before conducting an analysis, it is therefore important to understand where and how the data were collected and, equally importantly, where records are missing.
If you have not used GBIF before, try exploring the portal and searching for an organism or research topic relevant to your work. You may discover that data useful for your research already exist.
Research institutions can also publish data. Publishing data, however, is more demanding than searching for and downloading them. Data providers must participate in the GBIF network, and the process usually requires cooperation with the relevant coordinator or contact point.