GBIF
GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, is an international network that publishes species occurrence records shared by museums, surveys and citizen science projects. Through ScholarMuse an agent can give a scientific or common name, have it matched to a taxon in the GBIF backbone taxonomy, and get occurrence records with coordinates, dates and the publishing dataset. Only CC0 and CC BY records are returned.
ScholarMuse tools: search_species_occurrence. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from GBIF.
search_species_occurrence
One record per occurrence. The response also carries the matched taxon and the total count of matching CC0 and CC BY records alongside the records.
- scientificName
- Scientific name on the record
- latitude
- Decimal latitude
- longitude
- Decimal longitude
- coordinateUncertaintyM
- Coordinate uncertainty in metres, when given
- date
- Event date of the observation or collection
- country
- Two-letter country code
- stateProvince
- State or province
- locality
- Locality text, cut at 200 characters
- basisOfRecord
- Kind of record, e.g. human observation or preserved specimen
- dataset
- Name of the publishing dataset
- datasetUrl
- GBIF page of that dataset, for citation
- license
- CC0-1.0 or CC BY 4.0
What it covers
- Occurrence records for any taxon in the GBIF backbone taxonomy, looked up by scientific or common name.
- Filters for country (two-letter ISO code), a range of years, and records with coordinates.
- Only records marked as present; absence records are not requested.
Limits
- Only records licensed CC0 1.0 or CC BY 4.0 are counted and returned; CC BY-NC records are left out, so totals are lower than on gbif.org.
- At most 300 records per call (50 by default), with no paging to later records and no bulk download.
- Records without coordinates are left out unless the agent turns that filter off.
- A name that GBIF can only match to a genus or family is tried as a common name; if that fails too, the tool returns an error.
How ScholarMuse reaches GBIF
The connector calls the public GBIF API at api.gbif.org/v1: species/match (and species/search for common names) to resolve the name, then occurrence/search. No API key is sent.
Occurrence searches are cached for up to 12 hours and name matches for up to 30 days, so newly published records can take half a day to appear.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: CC0 1.0 or CC BY 4.0 per record
GBIF.org — Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Cite the publishing dataset of each record.
Records that come from GBIF carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow GBIF's own citation guidance.
