GBIF Species Occurrence Scraper — Biodiversity Records API

Extract species occurrence records from the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) open API — the world's largest aggregator of biodiversity observation data, with over 3.8 billion records from museums, herbaria, citizen science projects, and government surveys.

What this Actor does

This Actor wraps the public GBIF Occurrence Search API and returns clean, structured JSON records ready for ecological research, conservation reporting, biodiversity assessments, environmental impact studies, and species distribution modeling.

Use cases:

• Conservation biology: Track sightings of threatened species across geographies and time periods.
• Environmental consulting: Pull baseline biodiversity for a project area before a development EIA/EIS.
• Academic research: Bulk-pull occurrence data for niche modeling (MaxEnt, SDM) without writing API glue code.
• Education: Build classroom datasets of charismatic megafauna, native flora, or invasive species.
• GIS pipelines: Feed standardized lat/lng + taxonomy records into ArcGIS, QGIS, or PostGIS.

How to scrape GBIF biodiversity data

1. Enter a Scientific Name (e.g., Panthera leo, Quercus alba). Leave blank for any species.
2. Optionally restrict by Country (ISO 2-letter code), Basis of Record, Year From / Year To.
3. Toggle Only Records With Coordinates to filter out occurrences without GPS data.
4. Set Max Results (1–100,000).
5. Run. Output appears in the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Output fields

Field	Description
gbifID	Globally unique GBIF occurrence key
scientificName	Original scientific name as recorded
acceptedScientificName	Currently accepted name (post-taxonomic backbone match)
taxonRank	Rank (species, subspecies, etc.)
kingdom / phylum / class / order / family / genus / species	Linnaean classification
country / stateProvince / locality	Geographic context
decimalLatitude / decimalLongitude	WGS84 coordinates
coordinateUncertaintyInMeters	Reported positional uncertainty
eventDate / year / month / day	When the observation occurred
basisOfRecord	HUMAN_OBSERVATION, PRESERVED_SPECIMEN, etc.
individualCount	Number of individuals recorded
recordedBy	Collector/observer name
institutionCode / collectionCode / catalogNumber	Specimen provenance
datasetKey / datasetName	Source dataset attribution
publishingOrgKey / publishingCountry	Dataset publisher info
license	CC license terms
issues	GBIF data-quality flags
gbifUrl	Direct link to the occurrence detail page

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-result pricing. The first results are typically returned in under a minute. GBIF imposes no scraping costs or rate limits for the bulk search endpoint within polite use.

Example input

{
  "scientificName": "Panthera leo",
  "country": "KE",
  "yearFrom": 2018,
  "hasCoordinate": true,
  "maxResults": 1000
}

Example output (single record)

{
  "gbifID": 4011982334,
  "scientificName": "Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758)",
  "kingdom": "Animalia",
  "family": "Felidae",
  "country": "Kenya",
  "decimalLatitude": -1.4063,
  "decimalLongitude": 35.0094,
  "eventDate": "2023-08-14",
  "basisOfRecord": "HUMAN_OBSERVATION",
  "datasetName": "iNaturalist Research-grade Observations"
}

FAQ

Q: Is this legal? Yes. GBIF aggregates data under Creative Commons licenses (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-NC). Each record carries its license field — respect it in downstream use.

Q: What if I get fewer results than I asked for? GBIF's endOfRecords flag signals the end of the result set for your filters. Broaden your query (remove country, expand year range) to retrieve more.

Q: Can I request specific occurrence IDs? This Actor uses the search endpoint. For single-record lookups, GBIF's /occurrence/{key} endpoint is best called directly.

Q: Coordinate uncertainty seems high — is that a bug? No. Many citizen-science records have ±1,000–10,000 m uncertainty. Use the coordinateUncertaintyInMeters field to filter to research-grade points.

Legal disclaimer

This Actor accesses the public GBIF API in accordance with GBIF's published terms. Output records remain subject to their original Creative Commons licenses — attribute the source dataset and publisher when reusing data. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by GBIF. For commercial reuse of large data volumes, consult GBIF's citation guidelines.