This website, gbif.us, serves as a national data portal and access point to U.S. species occurrence data contributed to GBIF. It is co-managed by the scientific community of the United States via https://github.com/gbif/hp-bison.

Currently co-managers include representatives from USGS, iDigBio, VertNet, Symbiota Support Hub, and the Vermont Atlas of Life. If you would like to get involved, you are welcome to submit issues and pull requests to the GitHub repo. If you are interested in more formal involvement, please pull an issue with that request and we can discuss possibilities there.

The community also co-manages an Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) instance to faciliate publication of data to GBIF.

GBIF-US is the US node for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). GBIF-US is responsible for coordinating GBIF-related activities within the US, and is guided by the delegation and community. Funding for GBIF-US comes from the National Science Foundation.

What role does USGS play?

The Science Analytics and Synthesis Program (SAS) of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) manages GBIF-US to facilitate access to species occurrence data. The Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) project provided the foundation for the current implementation of GBIF-US.

What are species occurrence data?

Species occurrence data are records of an organism at a particular time in a particular place, and are primary or ancillary evidence for many biological field investigations. Records may describe presence, absence, or abundance (with any unit of quantity) and support analyses and investigations of species trends, drivers of change, and potential implications of future changes in biodiversity in the United States and U.S. Territories.