GBIF Biodiversity Data Scraper — 2+ Billion Occurrence Records

$0.005 per record · Structured species, occurrence, and dataset data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) — the world's largest open biodiversity database with 2.4B+ occurrence records across 100M+ species.

Purpose-built for ecology research, conservation analytics, citizen-science pipelines, environmental impact reports, and LLM/RAG corpora on natural history.

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What You Get

• Species search — scientific names, common names, taxonomic rank, GBIF keys
• Species details — full taxonomy (kingdom → species), synonyms, distribution, media
• Occurrence search — geo-tagged records with coordinates, date, recorder, institution
• Dataset search — source datasets (herbaria, camera traps, citizen science)
• Full taxonomic filters — kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, country, year range
• No authentication required — public GBIF API

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4 Use Cases (ready-to-run JSON inputs)

1. Species presence in a country (conservation / EIA)

{
  "mode": "occurrence_search",
  "scientificName": "Panthera tigris",
  "country": "IN",
  "year": "2020,2024",
  "limit": 100
}

Returns 100 tiger occurrence records in India 2020–2024 with lat/lon, date, dataset, recorder. Direct input for GIS overlays, Environmental Impact Assessments, and species-range papers.

2. Build a taxonomic tree for a family

{
  "mode": "species_search",
  "query": "Felidae",
  "rank": "SPECIES",
  "limit": 100
}

All species under Felidae (cats) with GBIF keys you can drill into with species_details. Perfect for building a structured wildlife reference for a research paper or educational app.

3. Find open biodiversity datasets for a region

{
  "mode": "dataset_search",
  "country": "BR",
  "datasetType": "OCCURRENCE",
  "limit": 50
}

50 open occurrence datasets from Brazil (think: Amazon biodiversity, herbarium digitizations). Use for meta-studies and data-consolidation pipelines.

4. Citizen-science feed (new records this year)

{
  "mode": "occurrence_search",
  "kingdom": "Animalia",
  "year": "2025",
  "country": "US",
  "limit": 200
}

Recent US wildlife records — ideal for dashboards, biodiversity trackers, or RAG over current fauna data.

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Input Schema

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	enum	species_search	species_search / species_details / occurrence_search / dataset_search
query	string	—	Keyword for species/dataset search
speciesKey	integer	—	GBIF species key for species_details
scientificName	string	—	Filter occurrences by Latin name
kingdom	enum	—	Animalia / Plantae / Fungi / Bacteria / Archaea / Protozoa / Chromista / Viruses
phylum / family / genus	string	—	Taxonomic filters
rank	enum	—	KINGDOM … SPECIES / SUBSPECIES
country	string	—	ISO-2 country code (US, BR, IN, …)
year	string	—	Year or range (2024 or 2020,2024)
datasetType	enum	—	OCCURRENCE / CHECKLIST / METADATA / SAMPLING_EVENT
limit	integer	20	Results per request
offset	integer	0	Pagination

Output (sample — occurrence_search)

{
  "key": 4518520317,
  "scientificName": "Panthera tigris (Linnaeus, 1758)",
  "kingdom": "Animalia",
  "phylum": "Chordata",
  "class": "Mammalia",
  "family": "Felidae",
  "genus": "Panthera",
  "decimalLatitude": 21.0456,
  "decimalLongitude": 79.8112,
  "eventDate": "2024-02-14T08:30:00",
  "country": "India",
  "datasetName": "iNaturalist Research-grade Observations",
  "basisOfRecord": "HUMAN_OBSERVATION",
  "license": "CC_BY_NC_4_0"
}

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Pricing & Performance

• Pay-per-event: $0.005 per record returned
• Typical cost: $0.10 for 20 records, $1 for 200 records, $5 for 1,000 records
• Speed: ~20–50 records/second (API rate limits respected)
• Free Apify tier: $5/month credit = ~1,000 records

Compare to commercial biodiversity APIs with paywalls — GBIF data is open under CC0 / CC-BY and you pay only for the extraction pipeline.

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Integrations

• QGIS / ArcGIS — ingest occurrence JSON → plot geo-points on maps
• Pandas / Polars — species presence matrices, year-over-year trend tables
• Zapier / Make / n8n — alert on new records in your region
• LangChain / LlamaIndex — RAG over species taxonomy, build a "biodiversity assistant"
• Vector DBs (Pinecone / Weaviate / Qdrant) — embed species descriptions for semantic search
• Neo4j / Graphiti — full taxonomy graph (Kingdom → Phylum → Class → Order → Family → Genus → Species)
• Python SDK

  from apify_client import ApifyClient
  client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_TOKEN>")
  run = client.actor("Helpermara/gbif-biodiversity-scraper").call(run_input={
      "mode": "occurrence_search",
      "scientificName": "Panthera tigris",
      "country": "IN",
      "limit": 100
  })
  for record in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
      print(record["decimalLatitude"], record["decimalLongitude"], record["eventDate"])
  

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FAQ

Is GBIF data free? Yes — data is openly licensed (CC0 / CC-BY per dataset). You pay only for the Apify actor extraction.

How recent is the data? GBIF is updated continuously by contributing institutions. Typical lag: days to weeks.

Can I get images / media? Yes — species_details includes media URLs (iNaturalist photos, museum specimens).

Coordinate precision? Most records have decimal degrees. Some sensitive species (endangered) are coordinate-masked by GBIF for conservation reasons.

How does this compare to iNaturalist? iNaturalist is a contributing dataset in GBIF. GBIF aggregates iNaturalist + GBIF + herbaria + museum collections + citizen science into one unified query surface.

License? Apify actor is free with pay-per-event pricing. GBIF data license depends on source dataset (mostly CC0 / CC-BY).

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Companion Actors

• CrossRef Scholarly Articles Scraper — 150M+ scholarly papers (citation-linkable to biodiversity research)
• Semantic Scholar Scraper — 200M+ academic papers with influence scores
• arXiv Paper Scraper — physical / quantitative biology preprints
• Wikipedia Scraper — species articles in 300+ languages

Use together for a full ecology knowledge stack — field records (GBIF) + academic papers + encyclopedic context.

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Keywords

gbif, biodiversity, species, occurrence, taxonomy, ecology, conservation, wildlife, flora, fauna, citizen science, inaturalist, herbarium, iucn, camera trap, species distribution, eia, environmental impact, natural history, scientific data, open data, species api, taxonomic rank, kingdom, plantae, animalia

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Changelog

• 2026-04-24 — README rewrite: SEO push with use cases, pricing, integrations, FAQ
• Prior — stable; 4 modes (species search / species details / occurrence search / dataset search)