gbif-biodiversity-guide

Scope

GBIF indexes occurrence records (specimens, field observations, literature and survey records) from thousands of publishers, alongside the GBIF backbone taxonomy and other checklists. Access is keyless and read-only. Reach for it to answer where and when a taxon has been recorded, which collections hold it, what a group contains, and where a record came from.

It does not:

• Resolve a place name. A region is a country code, a stateProvince string taken from a facet, a GADM GID, a latitude/longitude box, or a WKT polygon built from coordinates you already hold.
• Search occurrence records by free text. Locality descriptions, collector notes, and identification remarks are not searchable; every occurrence filter is a structured Darwin Core field.
• Measure abundance. Every occurrence count it returns is a number of records.

Identifiers

Facet bucket names are strings. A SPECIES_KEY bucket named "2878688" is the backbone key 2878688: pass it as a number.

Gates

1. Read matchType before using a matched key. On HIGHERRANK, use taxonKey only when the taxon its notice names is the one you meant. A species name that fell back to its genus or kingdom is not a match for that species.
2. Choose the region filter for the population you mean. They select different records:
   • country is where the record was made, and includes records without coordinates.
   • stateProvince is the string each dataset wrote, so it misses other spellings of the same region.
   • gadmGid, the latitude/longitude ranges, and geometry are computed from coordinates, so they drop every record that has none.