GBIF's information infrastructure serves conservation, science, and society

GBIF's mission is to make the world's biodiversity data freely available via the Internet to benefit science, society and a sustainable future. The data concerned are primary species-occurrence data, as well as scientific names. In addition, GBIF is building a modular, web-services based information infrastructure that facilitates linking together ecological, species-level, and molecular datasets. This makes it possible for other organizations to construct Internet portals that can utilize GBIF data and functionalities to address their own areas of interest. Of course, conservation and regulation are two of the main users of GBIF-mediated data. GBIF is a member of the Conservation Commons Already available through GBIF are data cleansing tools, a website toolkit and simple-to-install software to enable data sharing. The new GBIF data portal will allow many types of user-crafted searches of the data that are mediated by GBIF, and link-outs to molecular and genetic databases as well as ecological information and mapping tools. GBIF demonstration projects have demonstrated the utility of georeferenced species-occurrence data not only in scientific research but also in land use planning, decision-making and other real-world applications.