GBIF's mission is to make the world’s biodiversity data freely and universally available via the Internet. As a megascience initiative, GBIF aims to provide an essential global informatics infrastructure for biodiversity research and applications worldwide.
The diagram shows how the major informatics components are integrated within the GBIF infrastructure:
The infrastructure is divided into six major components:
Through appropriate standards and tools, the infrastructure is designed to serve the following types of data:
