Sharp-eyed visitors to the GBIF websites may have noticed a drop in the total number of records from 389 million to 383 million in December 2012.
The explanation is that software and processing upgrades have made it easier to spot duplicate records and old versions of records and datasets that are no longer being published.
The removal of such records thus contributes to cleaning up the data accessible via the GBIF network, thanks to the informatics tools developed and promoted by the GBIF community.
Details of the changes are explained by GBIF systems analyst Andrea Hahn in the GBIF developer blog.