Not all filters are born equal It happens sometimes that users need GBIF data that fall within specific boundaries. The GBIF Portal provides a location filter where it is possible to draw a rectangle or a polygon on the map and get the occurrence records within this shape. However these tools have a limited precision and occasionally the job calls for more complex shapes than the GBIF Portal currently supports.

This blog post covers the publication of multimedia on GBIF. However, it is not intended to be documentation. For more information, please check the references below. NB: GBIF does not host original multimedia files and there is no way to upload pictures to the platform. For more information, please read the how to publish paragraphs. Media displayed on the GBIF portal Let’s say that you are looking for pictures of otters, or perhaps the call of a sea eagle.

Can we automatically label citizen science datasets? The short answer is yes, partially. Why label GBIF datasets as “citizen science”? What is citizen science? Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur (or non-professional) scientists. Citizen science is sometimes described as “public participation in scientific research,” participatory monitoring, and participatory action research (wikipedia definition). Citizen science on GBIF A 2016 study showed that nearly half of all occurrence records shared through the GBIF network come from datasets with significant volunteer contributions (for more information, see our “citizen science” page on gbif.

The GBIF maps API is an under-used but powerful web service provided by GBIF. The maps API is used by the main GBIF portal to create the maps including the big map used on gbif.org. We can make a simple call to the API by pasting the link below into a web browser. https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/occurrence/density/0/0/0@1x.png?style=purpleYellow.point You should end up with an image like this. This api call is composed essentially of two elements

EBCC Atlas of European Breeding Birds (gridded) Naturalis Biodiversity Center (NL) - Aves (not gridded) Gridded data in GBIF Gridded datasets are a known problem at GBIF. Many datasets have equally-spaced points in a regular pattern. These datasets are usually systematic national surveys or data taken from some atlas (“so-called rasterized collection designs”). In this blog post I will describe how I found gridded dataset in GBIF.