🦋 GBIF Occurrence Search Scraper

🚀 Export species occurrence records in seconds. Filter 1.5 billion+ biodiversity observations and museum specimens by taxon, country, year, dataset, and basis of record. No API key, no registration, no SQL pipelines.

The GBIF Occurrence Search Scraper pulls structured species observation and specimen records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, returning 31 fields per record, including full taxonomy, coordinates, event date, recorder, license, and links back to the source occurrence page. GBIF aggregates field observations, museum specimens, and citizen-science contributions from thousands of natural history institutions and biodiversity networks worldwide.

The dataset covers every kingdom, more than 250 ISO country codes, and ten distinct basis-of-record categories ranging from preserved specimens to fossil records and human observations. This Actor turns that catalog into downloadable CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML files in under five minutes. Server-side filters do the heavy lifting, so you skip building your own ingestion pipeline.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Ecologists, conservation NGOs, biodiversity researchers, GIS analysts, museum curators, environmental consultancies, agritech teams	Range maps, species distribution modeling, conservation status reports, red-list inputs, biosecurity feeds, ecology dashboards

📋 What the GBIF Occurrence Search Scraper does

Five filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🌿 Taxonomy search. Pull every occurrence for a scientific name, taxon key, or rank.
• 🌍 Country filter. Restrict to one or many ISO codes such as US, BR, KE, AU.
• 📅 Date window. Limit to a year range, useful for trend analysis or recent surveys.
• 📐 Coordinate filter. Keep only records with decimal latitude and longitude for mapping.
• 🔬 Record type filter. Choose from human observations, machine observations, preserved specimens, fossils, living specimens, material samples, and more.

Each record includes the GBIF ID, full Linnaean hierarchy, scientific name, taxon rank, basis of record, country, locality, decimal coordinates, elevation, event date, recorder, dataset key, license, IUCN status when available, and the canonical occurrence URL.

💡 Why it matters: biodiversity data drives conservation funding, environmental impact reports, climate research, and legal compliance. Building your own GBIF pipeline means handling pagination, country-code lookups, and taxonomic backbone joins. This Actor skips all of that and refreshes the dataset on every run.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: basisOfRecord, catalogNumber, class, collectionCode, country, countryCode, datasetKey, day, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, depth, elevation, eventDate, family, gbifID, genus, identifiedBy, issues, iucnRedListCategory, kingdom, license, locality, month, occurrenceUrl, order, phylum, publishingOrgKey, recordedBy, scientificName, scrapedAt, species, stateProvince, taxonomicStatus, taxonRank, vernacularName, year. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the GBIF Occurrence Search Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a taxon, country, year range, and basis of record. Set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) or any of its publishing institutions. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open biodiversity data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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