GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is the dataset that underpins most modern biodiversity research with a spatial component.
By aggregating occurrence records from natural history museums, citizen science platforms like eBird and iNaturalist, government inventories, and research surveys across 100+ countries, GBIF has built the largest open collection of geolocated species observations on Earth. This scale is what makes it indispensable — no single institution or national database comes close to the taxonomic and geographic breadth that GBIF provides, and the standardized Darwin Core format means records from a 19th-century museum specimen and a 2024 iNaturalist photo can sit in the same analysis.
For GIS professionals, GBIF is the primary input for species distribution modeling, where occurrence points are paired with environmental layers — climate from WorldClim or CHELSA, land cover from ESA WorldCover, elevation from SRTM — to map habitat suitability, forecast range shifts under climate change, or identify biodiversity hotspots.
Beyond research, GBIF data directly informs conservation policy: IUCN Red List assessments, protected area planning, environmental impact assessments, and national reporting under the Convention on Biological Diversity all draw on GBIF-mediated records. The key analytical consideration is that GBIF is presence-only data with uneven sampling effort, so spatial thinning and careful background point selection are essential steps in any rigorous analysis.
