Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org) was founded in 2001 as an intergovernmental scientific infrastructure aimed at providing free and open access to biodiversity data, via the Internet. It currently offers a single online access point to over 400 million biodiversity records from more than 12,000 datasets published by over 500 institutions, ranging from museum specimens collected from the earliest days of natural history exploration, to current observations by ‘citizen scientists’ and monitoring from research expeditions. GBIF operates through a network of national and thematic ‘nodes’, and a secretariat based in Copenhagen, Denmark.