One of GBIF’s main purposes is to establish a global decentralised network of interoperable databases that contain primary biodiversity data. These data include:

• Information associated with specimen occurrences documented in biological collections
• Records of plants and animals in nature
• Organism names and metadata on curating institutions and projects
• Descriptions of data holdings.

Specimen occurrence data nearly always have certain common attributes, such as scientific name, location and collection date. So, they can easily be recast into a common data format and shared across the globe using internet-based protocols.
To learn how to share your data within the GBIF network and for more detailed information on the available tools and services, please refer to the Informatics section.