Using shapefiles on GBIF data with R

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.

Sharing images, sounds and videos on GBIF

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.

Finding citizen science datasets on GBIF

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).

Plot almost anything using the GBIF maps api

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.

Finding gridded datasets

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”).

GBIF download trends

Link To App Explanation of tool This tool plots the downloads through time for species or other taxonomic groups with more than 25 downloads at GBIF. Downloads at GBIF most often occur through the web interface. In a previous post, we saw that most users are downloading data from GBIF via filtering by scientific name (aka Taxon Key). Since the GBIF index currently sits at over 1 billion records (a 400+GB csv), most users will simplying filter by their taxonomic group of interest and then generate a download.