The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments providing global data that document the occurrence of species. GBIF currently integrates datasets documenting over 1.6 billion species occurrences, growing daily. The GBIF occurrence dataset combines data from a wide array of sources including specimen-related data from natural history museums, observations from citizen science networks and environment recording schemes. While these data are constantly changing at GBIF.org, periodic snapshots are taken and made available on AWS.

The GBIF Backbone Taxonomy is a single, synthetic management classification with the goal of covering all names GBIF is dealing with. It's the taxonomic backbone that allows GBIF to integrate name based information from different resources, no matter if these are occurrence datasets, species pages, names from nomenclators or external sources like EOL, Genbank or IUCN. This backbone allows taxonomic search, browse and reporting operations across all those resources in a consistent way and to provide means to crosswalk names from one source to another.

It is updated regulary through an automated process in which the Catalogue of Life acts as a starting point also providing the complete higher classification above families. Additional scientific names only found in other authoritative nomenclatural and taxonomic datasets are then merged into the tree, thus extending the original catalogue and broadening the backbones name coverage. The GBIF Backbone taxonomy also includes identifiers for Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) drawn from the barcoding resources iBOL and UNITE.

International Barcode of Life project (iBOL), Barcode Index Numbers (BINs). BINs are connected to a taxon name and its classification by taking into account all names applied to the BIN and picking names with at least 80% consensus. If there is no consensus of name at the species level, the selection process is repeated moving up the major Linnaean ranks until consensus is achieved.

UNITE - Unified system for the DNA based fungal species, Species Hypotheses (SHs). SHs are connected to a taxon name and its classification based on the determination of the RefS (reference sequence) if present or the RepS (representative sequence). In the latter case, if there is no match in the UNITE taxonomy, the lowest rank with 100% consensus within the SH will be used.

The GBIF Backbone Taxonomy is available for download at https://hosted-datasets.gbif.org/datasets/backbone/ in different formats together with an archive of all previous versions.

The following 105 sources have been used to assemble the GBIF backbone with number of names given in brackets:

• Catalogue of Life Checklist - 4766428 names
• International Barcode of Life project (iBOL) Barcode Index Numbers (BINs) - 635951 names
• UNITE - Unified system for the DNA based fungal species linked to the classification - 611208 names
• The Paleobiology Database - 212054 names
• World Register of Marine Species - 188857 names
• The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera - 183894 names
• The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) - 131891 names
• GBIF Backbone Taxonomy - 114350 names
• TAXREF - 109374 names
• The Leipzig catalogue of vascular plants - 75380 names
• ZooBank - 73549 names
• Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) - 68377 names
• Plazi.org taxonomic treatments database - 61346 names
• Genome Taxonomy Database r207 - 60545 names
• International Plant Names Index - 52329 names
• Fauna Europaea - 45077 names
• The National Checklist of Taiwan (Catalogue of Life in Taiwan, TaiCoL) - 36193 names
• Dyntaxa. Svensk taxonomisk databas - 35892 names
• The Plant List with literature - 32692 names
• United Kingdom Species Inventory (UKSI) - 29643 names
• Artsnavnebasen - 29208 names
• The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species - 21221 names
• Afromoths, online database of Afrotropical moth species (Lepidoptera) - 13961 names
• Brazilian Flora 2020 project - Projeto Flora do Brasil 2020 - 13829 names
• Prokaryotic Nomenclature Up-to-Date (PNU) - 10079 names
• Checklist Dutch Species Register - Nederlands Soortenregister - 8814 names
• ICTV Master Species List (MSL) - 7852 names
• Cockroach Species File - 6020 names
• GRIN Taxonomy - 5882 names
• Taxon list of fungi and fungal-like organisms from Germany compiled by the DGfM - 4570 names
• Catalogue of Afrotropical Bees - 3623 names
• Catalogue of Tenebrionidae (Coleoptera) of North America - 3327 names
• Checklist of Beetles (Coleoptera) of Canada and Alaska. Second Edition. - 3312 names
• Systema Dipterorum - 2850 names
• Catalogue of the Pterophoroidea of the World - 2807 names
• The Clements Checklist - 2675 names
• Taxon list of Hymenoptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 2496 names
• IOC World Bird List, v13.2 - 2366 names
• Official Lists and Indexes of Names in Zoology - 2310 names
• National checklist of all species occurring in Denmark - 1922 names
• Myriatrix - 1876 names
• Database of Vascular Plants of Canada (VASCAN) - 1822 names
• Taxon list of vascular plants from Bavaria, Germany compiled in the context of the BFL project - 1771 names
• Orthoptera Species File - 1742 names
• A list of the terrestrial fungi, flora and fauna of Madeira and Selvagens archipelagos - 1602 names
• Aphid Species File - 1565 names
• World Spider Catalog - 1561 names
• Taxon list of Jurassic Pisces of the Tethys Palaeo-Environment compiled at the SNSB-JME - 1270 names
• Backbone Family Classification Patch - 1143 names
• GBIF Algae Classification - 1100 names
• International Cichorieae Network (ICN): Cichorieae Portal - 975 names
• Psocodea Species File - 803 names
• New Zealand Marine Macroalgae Species Checklist - 787 names
• Annotated checklist of endemic species from the Western Balkans - 754 names
• Taxon list of animals with German names (worldwide) compiled at the SMNS - 503 names
• Catalogue of the Alucitoidea of the World - 472 names
• Lygaeoidea Species File - 462 names
• Catálogo de Plantas y Líquenes de Colombia - 422 names
• GBIF Backbone Patch - 317 names
• Phasmida Species File - 259 names
• Cortinariaceae fetched from the Index Fungorum API - 234 names
• Coreoidea Species File - 233 names
• GTDB supplement - 139 names
• Mantodea Species File - 119 names
• Endemic species in Taiwan - 93 names
• Taxon list of Araneae from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 88 names
• Species of Hominidae - 78 names
• Taxon list of Sternorrhyncha from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 77 names
• Taxon list of mosses from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 75 names
• Mammal Species of the World - 73 names
• Plecoptera Species File - 71 names
• Species Fungorum Plus - 64 names
• Catalogue of the type specimens of Cosmopterigidae (Lepidoptera: Gelechioidea) from research collections of the Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences - 47 names
• Species named after famous people - 41 names
• Dermaptera Species File - 36 names
• Taxon list of Trichoptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 34 names
• True Fruit Flies (Diptera, Tephritidae) of the Afrotropical Region - 33 names
• Range and Regularities in the Distribution of Earthworms of the Earthworms of the USSR Fauna. Perel, 1979 - 32 names
• Taxon list of Diplura from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 30 names
• Lista de referencia de especies de aves de Colombia - 2022 - 24 names
• Taxon list of Auchenorrhyncha from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 20 names
• Catalogue of the type specimens of Polycestinae (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) from research collections of the Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences - 19 names
• Taxon list of Thysanoptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 19 names
• Lista de especies de vertebrados registrados en jurisdicción del Departamento del Huila - 18 names
• Taxon list of Microcoryphia (Archaeognatha) from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 15 names
• Catalogue of the type specimens of Bufonidae and Megophryidae (Amphibia: Anura) from research collections of the Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences - 12 names
• Grylloblattodea Species File - 11 names
• Coleorrhyncha Species File - 9 names
• Taxon list of liverworts from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 9 names
• Embioptera Species File - 7 names
• Taxon list of Pisces and Cyclostoma from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 6 names
• Taxon list of Pteridophyta from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 6 names
• Taxon list of Siphonaptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 5 names
• The Earthworms of the Fauna of Russia. Perel, 1997 - 5 names
• Taxon list of Zygentoma from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 4 names
• Asiloid Flies: new taxa of Diptera: Apioceridae, Asilidae, and Mydidae - 3 names
• Taxon list of Protura from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 3 names
• Taxon list of hornworts from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 2 names
• Chrysididae Species File - 1 names
• Taxon list of Dermaptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 1 names
• Taxon list of Diplopoda from Germany in the context of the GBOL project - 1 names
• Taxon list of Orthoptera (Grashoppers) from Germany compiled at the SNSB - 1 names
• Taxon list of Pscoptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 1 names
• Taxon list of Pseudoscorpiones from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 1 names
• Taxon list of Raphidioptera from Germany compiled in the context of the GBOL project - 1 names

Xiphosura of the world

Xiphosura

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) indexes thousands of biodiversity datasets from Natural History Collections, citizen science initiatives (e.g., iNaturalist, eBird), and other sources. As part of the index process, GBIF associates at least two identifiers with indexed records: a record id (aka gbifID) and a dataset id (aka dataset key). These ids are central to do lookup, reference data, and package interpreted data products.

This publication contains an exhaustive list of GBIF IDs and ids associated by their data providers as derived from:

GBIF.org (01 March 2023) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.pk3trq

The resource (size: ~260GB) provided by GBIF had content id hash://sha256/c8bac8acb28c8524c53589b3a40e322dbbbdadf5689fef2e20266fbf6ddf6b97 and was used to generate the resource included in this publication using

preston cat 'zip:hash://sha256/c8bac8acb28c8524c53589b3a40e322dbbbdadf5689fef2e20266fbf6ddf6b97!/0015281-230224095556074.csv'
| cut -f 1,2,3,37,38,39
| gzip\

gbifid.tsv.gz

with the content id of gbifid.tsv.gz (size: ~35GB) being hash://sha256/a339e32e10edaad585f61f2ded06cbb23e0618c65a6360db18d7d729054940a8 .

the first 10 lines of gbifid.tsv.gz as extracted via

preston cat --remote https://zenodo.org/record/7789866/files,https://linker.bio hash://sha256/a339e32e10edaad585f61f2ded06cbb23e0618c65a6360db18d7d729054940a8
| gunzip
| head

are:

gbifID datasetKey occurrenceID institutionCode collectionCode catalogNumber 2997162320 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 3399442 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00109669 2997162309 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 2733085 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00000818 2997162317 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 2733086 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00000888 2997162313 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 3399443 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00109744 2997162306 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 2733087 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00000889 2997162316 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 3399440 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00109605 2997162324 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 2733088 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00000890 2997162308 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 3399441 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00109615 2997162303 c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 2733089 CEPEC CEPEC CEPEC00000891

Note that at time of writing, the html resource associated with the occurrence id 2997162320, and data set key c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771 (extracted from of the first data row example above) are available via:

https://gbif.org/occurrence/2997162320

and

https://gbif.org/dataset/c71c8000-9fc7-422c-804a-ce6abe751771

respectively.

This resource was initially created to help integrate with Bionomia (https://bionomia.net) to help associate people identifiers provided by bionomia to their original records via their GBIF ids. Bionomia re-uses GBIF records ids as a way to define links between records and the people (e.g., curators, collectors, identifiers) that worked on them.

In other words, this resource provides a versioned translation table from the GBIF data universe (as defined by GBIF record ids, and dataset keys) to the data collections that exist (and evolve) independent of it.

Note that the resource identified by hash://sha256/c8bac8acb28c8524c53589b3a40e322dbbbdadf5689fef2e20266fbf6ddf6b97 was not included in this publication it was too big (260GB) to fit. You may be able to retrieve the resource from its original location at https://api.gbif.org/v1/occurrence/download/request/0015281-230224095556074.zip .

Dataset that provides a direct link to PNG's data hosted on the GBIF website/ records.

Contact emails: info@gbif.org / helpdesk@gbif.org

A dataset containing 797279757 species occurrences available in GBIF matching the query: All data. The dataset includes 797279757 records from 17347 constituent datasets: Please see http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download/0000865-170822121629195 for full list of all constituents.

Mammals of the world

Mammals

Publication date:
2022-12-06T07:37:19-06:00

A Repackaged Taxonomic Backbone of Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
---

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) facilitates access to billions of biodiversity data records. These records include detailed accounts of life on earth.

To help records of specific life forms, GBIF provides a taxonomic backbone [1,2]. This backbone contains a long list of names used to describe species and associated hierarchies and taxonomic publications. These lists are sourced from datasets around the world.

At time of writing (6 Dec 2022), GBIF publishes a simplified version of their taxonomic backbone at [https://hosted-datasets.gbif.org/datasets/backbone/](https://hosted-datasets.gbif.org/datasets/backbone/) [1].

This repository provides script to pre-process https://hosted-datasets.gbif.org/datasets/backbone/current/simple.txt.gz to help facilitate access and improve performance of the creation of search indexes.

Pre-process steps currently include:
1. reducing amount of columns
2. reverse sort by id
3. reverse sort by name

Contents
---

README:
this file

repackage-gbif-backbone.sh:
script used to repackage GBIF Simple Backbone.

repackage-gbif-backbone.log:
log of repackaging of GBIF Simple Backbone.

backbone-current-simple.txt.gz:
original GBIF backbone archive

gbif-backbone-by-name.tsv.gz:
two columns, gzipped, tab-separated text file with columns name, and id
reverse sorted by name

gbif-backbone-by-name.tsv.sha256:
sha256 hash of the uncompressed gbif-backbone-by-name.tsv.gz

gbif-backbone-by-id.tsv.gz:
20 columns, gzipped, tab-separated text file with first 20 columns of repackaged GBIF backbone file
reverse sorted by id

gbif-backbone-by-id.tsv.sha256:
sha256 hash of the uncompressed gbif-backbone-by-id.tsv.gz

References
---

[1] Simplied GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Accessed at https://hosted-datasets.gbif.org/datasets/backbone/ on 2022-12-06.
[2] GBIF Secretariat (2021). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2021-08-18.

Hash URIs
---
This publication includes the following content uris:

hash://sha256/82d5f2153b4533322692d95eeb18b0f103e1b2297e38bd9ea935b07ba86cd7d5
hash://sha256/50c155f66efb2efba0b8b624f8541e81cbe16a701d420a5073791fb993f72919
hash://sha256/9cd7d4c91292d86c726210446cd6fe45602505a7c0ea3b7c4f4f481f85f193ad (uncompressed)
hash://sha256/f950dde25cce9ba9cce67caa1c68ce0c99cb31fe2dc9658fec85a987d9f31654
hash://sha256/f21c6b90f17c6083fcfb4853f3c581dcc2aadd291691fa128392a205321f420b (uncompressed)
hash://sha256/5e0a4d1d2d1cccbdcc6b2c9831fafe61c54eb055f2d13ec40d9ac161889b9f89
hash://sha256/f6e477133d0585706ee5522963b204200cb3cd198f011cbf62be0fa8519763b5 (uncompressed)

This dataset contains occurrence data of flora and fauna species. From the Netherlands on a 5 x 5 km scale, data from other countries are exact. Observations from Belgium are excluded and can be accessed on GBIF through Natuurpunt and Natagora. It summarizes the observations recorded by >175.000 volunteers.

A dataset containing 702745831 species occurrences available in GBIF matching the query: All data. The dataset includes 702745831 records from 14508 constituent datasets: Please see http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download/0042046-160910150852091 for full list of all constituents.

A dataset containing 976783221 species occurrences available in GBIF matching the query: All data. The dataset includes 976783221 records from 19279 constituent datasets: Please see https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download/0001762-180412121330197 for full list of all constituents.

Traffic analytics, rankings, and competitive metrics for gbif.org as of November 2025

gbif.org is ranked #7412 in MX with 614.09K Traffic. Categories: Science. Learn more about website traffic, market share, and more!

This data publication contains a versioned archive of records used to extract mammalian trait data for the NSF funded Ranges Project. These data document the origin of the derived mammalian trait data, a core product of the Ranges project.

These records were compiled using the download service of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, https://gbif.org, [1]) as shown in the table below. Then, the resulting Darwin Core Archives associated with these compiled GBIF records were archived using Preston [2,3], a biodiversity data tracking tool.

The Ranges Project

Ranges is an NSF-funded project that seeks to digitize traits from over one million mammal specimens from 19 natural history museums, with a focus on western North America.

The project will allow researchers to build better baselines for biodiversity and improve predictions of how mammals respond to changing environments to address major digitization challenges, expand the utility of specimens and use them to create new scientific knowledge.

GBIF Download Data Records

A dataset containing 705448282 species occurrences available in GBIF matching the query: All data. The dataset includes 705448282 records from 15401 constituent datasets: Please see http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download/0058761-160910150852091 for full list of all constituents.

Vascular plants collection at SANT Herbarium

The Fish Collection at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History has fishes from all over the world. The collection has particularly large holdings of fishes from the Southeastern US and South America. Approximately 750,000 preserved specimens in more than 72,000 lots are cataloged in the collection.

The vertebrate paleontology program at the University of Kansas has, for over a century, sustained a national and international reputation. The reputation of the collection has been based more on intensive use than on sheer size. We now hold over 150,000 cataloged specimens (>75,000 are available in digital format) and around 400 publications related to our collections have been published in the last 35 years. Research strengths include: Paleozoic and Mesozoic fishes, Paleozoic tetrapods, Mesozoic marine vertebrates, Cenozoic small mammals and Natural Trap Cave fauna.

This citizen science web site is focused on expanding our understanding of the distribution, biogeography, biodiversity, and identification of Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) in the Western Hemisphere. Citizen scientists are encouraged to contribute their Odonata observations to the database using a web-based interface for submission. These observations may be human observation only or may be vouchered by photographs or specimens. An expert team of vetters reviews records of the rarer species and either accepts or declines the record based on the documentation. Declined records are not uploaded to GBIF. Odonata Central was started in 2003 but older records are accepted into the database.

A collection of marine biological survey data collated from literature.