GBIF
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international open data infrastructure allowing anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on Earth. Watch this video for a short yet comprehensive information on GBIF:
The GBIF portal supports four classes of datasets :
- Metadata-only: A description for non-digitised resource, allowing the discovery of evidences that are not yet available through the portal.
- Checklist: A thematic (geographical, taxonomical, ecological, etc.) list of organisms or taxa.
- Occurrence datasets: Datasets that contribute information about the location of individual organisms in time and space.
- Sampling-Event dataset: Datasets describing protocols and quantifying efforts used for measuring and monitoring the biodiversity, giving comparable information about the community composition or the abundance of species along a set of sampling events.
The Belgian Biodiversity Platform is the Belgian node to GBIF. As such, we support Belgian individuals and institutions wishing to publish or make use of biodiversity data on GBIF network.
BELGIAN DATA PORTAL
The Belgian Data Portal showcases biodiversity data published by Belgium through GBIF and its scientific use by Belgian authors. It can be considered as an extension of the Belgian GBIF node page, except the portal is directly managed by our IT team. This therefore gives us the opportunity to adapt the contents of your data for specifics needs (interface simplicity, visibility for the Belgian GBIF publishers and publishing institutions, etc.) at the national level while keeping GBIF portal as the source of information.
DEDICATED DATA PORTALS
The Belgian Biodiversity Platform develops and hosts dedicated data portals, which are user-friendly websites providing access to biodiversity data related to specific topics. For those presenting data from foreign country, these dedicated data portals are an important tool for repatriation of knowledge to the countries of origin. These websites are crafted by our IT expertise on databases development, geographic information system (GIS) and web design. The following are examples of our dedicated data portals:
- The Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Belgium
- The Formidabel database contains records on Belgian Ants data.
- IFBL portal presents checklists of the wild flora of Belgium.
- African Rodentia contains data on African rats and mice.
- AfroMoths is an online database of the Afrotropical moth species (Lepidoptera).
- Central African Plants contains list of known plant species in Central Africa.
- Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment database is an information system dedicated to freshwater animal species diversity and expert-based distribution information.
- Paraguayan Ants presents a collection of Paraguay ants that includes specimens collected in the dry Chaco region.
- ENBI, the European Network for Biodiversity Information project presents several type of datasets.
WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME?
- Access GBIF Data Portal, a single point of access to hundreds of millions of records, shared freely by hundreds of institutions worldwide, making it the biggest biodiversity database on the Internet.
- Access our Belgian Data Portal to get access to data published by Belgian researchers (data related to Belgium and other countries) and to discover Belgian institutions publishing on GBIF.
- Receive support to develop a dedicated data portal by contacting Ir. André Heughebaert.
- Suggest a dataset for publication using this form.
- Register to our Biodiversity Newsflash to be kept informed of our activities with GBIF.
- For more information on any of the services listed above, please contact the GBIF Belgian Node Manager, Ir André Heughebaert.