Global Biodiversity Information Facility

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around the world; GBIF's information architecture makes these data accessible and searchable through a single portal. Data available through the GBIF portal are primarily distribution data on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes for the world, and scientific names data. GBIF provides a single point of access (through its portal and web services) to more than 400 million records, shared freely by hundreds of instititutions worldwide, making it the biggest biodiversity database on the Internet.