GBIF exceeds 702 million biodiversity records

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s (GBIF) data portal continues to grow at a staggering rate. This global open data portal now publishes 702 million records from 30,712 separate datasets. This is a hugely important resource that is available to help understand how global biodiversity is changing, and is available to feed into international biodiversity policy and biodiversity science initiatives. The National Biodiversity Data Centre is delighted to be one of 54 country participants that publishes open data to this portal, ensuring that Irish data is contributing to this global data resources. As Ireland is a member of GBIF, it means that this vast data resources is also available to the Irish research community.

The GBIF Secretariat provides regular overviews of the growth of the global database, presents key statistics about the usages of these data, and highlights news items that demonstrate the value of this resource. More recently the updates feature many examples of research which uses GBIF data; these are extremely interesting and demonstrate how GBIF data contributes to the science-policy interface.

The most recent GBIF update can be downloaded by clicking on the image above.