Founding of Global Biodiversity Information Facility

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility, known as GBIF, is an international network and data infrastructure funded by governments, which provides open access to data about all types of life on Earth. It was created following a recommendation of the OECD Megascience Forum, which wanted to make biodiversity data from museums, herbaria and monitoring programmes freely available. Its secretariat is in Copenhagen, Denmark. GBIF's portal aggregates hundreds of millions of records of species observations and specimens contributed by institutions and citizen scientists around the world, and these are widely used in research on conservation, invasive species and the effects of climate change.

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