Global Biodiversity Information Facility
GBIF marks 25 years of FAIR biodiversity data, now spanning 70 countries and 3.8 billion records
Pensoft Publishers
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Cover image for the 25th anniversary of GBIF
view moreCredit: Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Digital biodiversity data has come a long way. Twenty-five years ago, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) launched with 21 founding countries and a simple but ambitious goal: make the world's biodiversity data freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. Today, GBIF’s network includes 70 participating countries, along with data providers across more than 120 countries, offering open access to over 3.8 billion biodiversity data records. This milestone is explored in a new overview article published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, which traces GBIF's trajectory over the past quarter-century and the challenges that remain as it looks ahead.
GBIF Executive Secretary Dr. Joe Miller remarked:
As GBIF celebrates its 25th anniversary, I’m very proud to serve as Executive Secretary of the organisation and to have contributed to this milestone publication. Detailing the history of GBIF both as an infrastructure and a global network, the article pays tribute to all the people involved in the network throughout a quarter century—be they staff, participants, nodes, volunteers, data publishers or data users. It represents the past, present and future of GBIF. I believe the paper will help strengthen our network and its capacity to respond to biodiversity data needs both now and in the future.
GBIF was established in 2001, following a proposal from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Megascience Forum which concluded that “an international mechanism is needed to make biodiversity data and information accessible worldwide”. The call came in response to a problem facing the international community after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: the world's biodiversity knowledge was scattered across a small number of institutions, concentrated in wealthy countries, with no shared way to bring it together in support of the newly signed Convention on Biological Diversity.
Now, a quarter-century later, GBIF has become the foundational infrastructure for biodiversity science and policy worldwide.
A Growing Global Network
GBIF's work is carried out through a distributed network of 47 voting country participants and 42 organisational participants, each represented by a national or thematic "node" that mobilises data, builds local capacity, and connects biodiversity communities to GBIF's infrastructure. More than 2,700 institutions, including museums, universities, government agencies, citizen science platforms, and a growing number of private-sector organisations, have published data through the network, with new publishers joining at a rate of more than two every three days, totalling nearly 3500 organisations involved.
Data Supporting Science and Policy
GBIF-mediated data now underpin an average of eight new peer-reviewed research papers per day, and have contributed to more than 15,000 publications to date, spanning fields from climate change and food security to public health and invasive species management. An independent 2023 assessment estimated that GBIF generates roughly €12 in societal benefit for every €1 invested, with researcher time savings alone valued at €35 million annually.
The organisation's impact also extends deeply into international policy. GBIF-mediated data support multiple indicators under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, inform assessments by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and are increasingly used by the private sector to meet emerging nature-related disclosure requirements.
Adapting to New Kinds of Data
Over 25 years, GBIF has continually expanded to accommodate new sources of biodiversity data - from digitised natural history specimens and citizen science observations to DNA-based records and, most recently, structured survey and monitoring data designed to support large-scale biodiversity tracking. In 2026, GBIF adopted the Catalogue of Life as its taxonomic backbone, the result of a multi-year collaboration to build shared infrastructure for reconciling species names across datasets.
Persistent Gaps Remain
Despite this growth, GBIF recognises that several significant challenges remain. The global loss of biodiversity continues to be described as a crisis in major international assessments, even as the data infrastructure has improved. And the data itself continues to reflect long-standing imbalances - regions with high biodiversity, particularly in the Global South, remain underrepresented, while well-studied, charismatic groups such as birds are overrepresented compared to less visible taxa; furthermore, many marine species and hard-to-identify cryptic habitats and organisms remain inadequately documented.
Closing these gaps was part of the original motivation for creating GBIF a quarter-century ago, and it remains valid today. GBIF's own assessment is that the network cannot resolve these asymmetries alone, doing so will depend on broader shifts in global scientific funding, data culture, and capacity, alongside GBIF's continued efforts to expand its Participant network and to diversify the types of data it can mobilise.
An additional, ongoing challenge is data heterogeneity and data quality, because GBIF indexes data, rather than directly vetting every record, it relies on its network of data publishers to maintain quality at source, and on users to report issues – a distributed model that keeps the network scalable but is not without friction.
Looking Ahead
Guided by its 2023–2027 Strategic Framework, GBIF is prioritising continued growth of its Participant network, expanded support for survey and monitoring data, and deeper integration of DNA-derived biodiversity records – all aimed at closing longstanding geographic and taxonomic gaps in digital biodiversity data worldwide.
Original source:
Miller J, Mandeville C, Schigel D, Gamboa Martinez J, Nielsen AM, Sheldon S, Hahn A, Raymond M, Bundgaard-Jensen S, Bagard Laursen M, Copas K, Blissett M, Høfft M, Méndez Hernández F, Noesgaard D, Rodrigues A, Russell L, Stjernegaard Jeppesen T, Elkjær Ørum-Kristensen A, Grosjean M, Waller J, Podolskiy M, Goodson H, Novakovikj S, Frøslev T, Ingenloff K, Sørensen Nilsson A, Svenningsen C, van der Meijden D, Suen A, Hakan Uzun A, Vaskova M, Nielsen C, Marentes Herrera E, Schaldemose Reibke N, Robertson T (2026) The Global Biodiversity Information Facility at 25. Biodiversity Data Journal 14: e208528. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.14.e208528
Journal
Biodiversity Data Journal
Article Title
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility at 25
The universe of GBIF data mediation. From left to right, this figure illustrates key steps and services in the mediation of data by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. At left, data-holding institutions publish varied biodiversity data types, which are made accessible thanks to open licensing and made interoperable through the application of data standards. Towards the center, data publishing entails placing standardized Darwin Core files online and registering them with GBIF, a process which is carried out through GBIF software (Integrated Publishing Toolkit and Metabarcoding Data Toolkit) and by external data-publishing brokers. Collectively, the data make up the GBIF Global Index. GBIF-mediated data become available for free and open access by anyone, anywhere, through the GBIF.org portal, tailored hosted portals, cloud services, or directly through the GBIF API and API-dependent access tools, such as rgbif and pygbif for access from within R and Python coding environments. At right, data application supports a broad range of research disciplines and the science-policy interface, broadening and amplifying the impact of biodiversity data worldwide, which is trackable by data publishers through DOI-based data citations.
A timeline of key events in the history of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. GBIF’s history began in 1999 with its proposal by the Biodiversity Informatics Subgroup of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Megascience Forum, and GBIF was officially established in 2001. The lower section of the figure illustrates key milestones in GBIF’s history. Along the main axis, bars indicate the emergence and integration of key data originator communities that had a substantial impact on the GBIF network and infrastructure. The upper section of the figure illustrates the cumulative total number of occurrence data records made available by GBIF. At right, the y-axis indicates the annual citations of GBIF-mediated data. Acronyms in the figure are: Natural History Collections (NHCs); Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT); Darwin Core (DwC); Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs); Biodiversity Information for Development (BID); Metabarcoding Data Programme (MDP); Metabarcoding Data Toolkit (MDT); Darwin Core Data Package (DwC DP); Catalogue of Life (COL).
Capacity development across the Global Biodiversity Information Facility community. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s success relies on building capacity within the GBIF network for mobilization, access, and use of free and open biodiversity data. GBIF uses a range of strategies to develop capacity at different levels of the GBIF community, guided by the GBIF Capacity Development Framework. This work is centered around the GBIF Participants and delivers impact at all levels of the global GBIF community.
Credit
Global Biodiversity Information Facility; Miller et al., 2026
Global Biodiversity Information Facility; Miller et al., 2026
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