Biodiversity and open data: GBIF, the international biodiversity database par excellence

Biodiversity refers to all living creatures on earth, comprising both the variety of ecosystems and life forms. Given the ecological and economic importance of natural capital represented by biodiversity, in 1999 the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) proposed the development of an international mechanism to make information and data on global biodiversity accessible. As a result of this initiative, 2001 saw  the launch of the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility ).

Accordingly, GBIF is a  technological open data infrastructure, funded by OECD national governments, which provides access to hundreds of thousands of millions of records of species on the planet (a more accurate measure  of  the volume of information GBIF: + 1,600 million species recorded in the system and around 780,000 million records of occurrences of these species) through a web portal and a layer of web services that facilitate the reuse of information and automated integration of GBIF as a public data source. All this information is shared freely by hundreds of institutions, both public and private, throughout the world, making GBIF the largest biodiversity database on the Web.

At the technological level, GBIF freely provides a set of tools to facilitate work with the infrastructure:

• Integrated Platform Toolkit (IPT): open source application for uploading data from a local source of information to the GBIF platform.
• Darwin Core Standards: vocabulary for the description of information on biodiversity prepared by the Taxonomic Databases Working Group.
• GBIF API: set of services to automate both data upload (Registry), and consultation processes of species and occurrences of these species.

GBIF operates through a network of national nodes, that coordinate the different participating organizations, publication and data access services and the necessary technological infrastructure. From the functional point of view, through these nodes, GBIF is conceived as a distributed system of databases to access this information. There is, therefore, no large central database created with the contributions of each collection manager, but instead each collection creates, maintains and manages its own database, and in this way controls what information it makes accessible.

Spain, as a founding member of GBIF, operates through GBIF.ES, the national biodiversity information node, sponsored by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and managed by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), with the support of the National Natural Science Museum and the Royal Botanic Garden. In addition, a data web portal has been set up to facilitate access and consultation for users of the specific information of the Spanish national node.