Biological surveys and monitoring

Our planet's biodiversity faces unprecedented pressures, making biological surveys and other efforts that monitor the state of nature more essential than ever. Whether driven by scientific inquiry, conservation needs, national and corporate reporting, or natural curiosity, the systematic collection data on the presence, absence and abundance of species over time is indispensable for assessing biodiversity patterns and processes, informing science, policy and action, and understanding how species assemblages and ecosystems respond to changing environments.

In response to growing global demand, the GBIF network and its robust infrastructure enable researchers and institutions to share and and discover high-quality standardized ecological data that is free, open and FAIR. The widely adopted Darwin Core standard and its extensions—most notably the Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories—ensure that users have access to essential information about survey design, sampling effort, scope and methods, enabling them to assess datasets' relevance and reliability and base their analyses on a more complete view of global biodiversity.