GBIF is an international network and data infrastructure funded by global governments that aims to provide everyone, everywhere with open access to data on all forms of life on Earth.

Coordinated through its Copenhagen Secretariat, the GBIF network of participating countries and organizations, operating through participation nodes, provides data holding institutions around the world with common standards and open source tools for sharing information on when and where species have been observed. This knowledge comes from multiple sources: museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th centuries to georeferenced photographs recently shared by an amateur naturalist using his smartphone.

The GBIF network aggregates all these sources using the Darwin Core standard forming the GBIF.org index, which brings together hundreds of millions of species occurrence records. Data publishers open access to their datasets through machine-readable Creative Commons licenses. This allows scientists, researchers, and others to reuse this data in hundreds of scientific publications and recommendations to policy makers published each year. Many of these analyses—which cover topics as varied as the impacts of climate change, the spread of invasive and exotic parasites, protected area conservation priorities, food security, and human health—would not be possible without it.