GBIF is trying to make it easier to share sequence-based data. In fact, this past year alone, we worked with UNITE to integrate species hypothesis for fungi and with EMBL-EBI to publish 295 metagenomics datasets. Unfortunately, documentation is not as quick to follow. Although we have now an FAQ on the topic, I thought that anyone could use a blog post with some advice and examples. Note that this blog post is not intended to be documentation.

Gridded datasets are now flagged on the GBIF registry This update builds on work from a previous blog post. Gridded datasets are broadly datasets that have low coordinate precision due to rasterized sampling or rounding. This can be a data quality issue because a user might assume an occurrence record has more precision than it actually does. Current statistics 572 datasets are currently flagged as gridded or rasterized on the registry.

Country Centroids are a known data quality issue within the GBIF network. Sometimes data publishers will not know the exact lat-lon location of a record and will enter the lat-long center of the country instead. This is a data issue because users might be unaware that an observation is pinned to a country center and assume it is a precise location. Below I plot the top country centroids found on GBIF within at least 1km.

Where are we missing biodiversity data? A hunger map is a map of missing biodiversity data (a biodiversity data gap). The main challenge with hunger mapping is proving that a species does not exist but should exist in a region. Hunger maps are important because they could be used to prioritize funding and digitization efforts. Currently, GBIF has no way of telling what species are missing from where. In this blog post I review some potential ways GBIF could make global biodiversity hunger maps.

Citizen science Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur (or non-professional) scientists. Biodiversity observations by citizen scientists have become significant in the last 10 years thanks to projects like: eBird iNaturalist Artportalen Sweden Artsdatabanken Norway Southern African Bird Atlas Bird Life Austrailia Dansk Ornitologisk Forening Great Back Yard Bird Count Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur (or non-professional) scientists.