recordCount

here is unconstrained on purpose: the registry endpoint matches the parsed country rather than the verbatim string, so gb, GBR, and GB all return the same 223 organizations. The uppercase-only rule the occurrence tools and gbifsearchdatasets carry exists to close a silent zero that does not occur on

field present only when explicitly flagged — not false on unlabeled taxa

Match up to 50 scientific names to backbone taxon keys in one call — results in input order, per-name NONE/ERROR isolation

Count occurrences matching a filter without fetching records — fast single-number response, filtered to sightings by default

Fetch full dataset metadata by UUID — title, description, citation, contacts, license, DOI, coverage

Fetch a single occurrence record by key — full Darwin Core record with GADM geography, presence/absence status, conservation status, media, and quality flags

Fetch a single backbone taxon by key — full classification, authorship, synonymy, vernacular name, descendant count

List direct children of a backbone taxon — genera within a family, species within a genus

Return the root-to-parent classification chain for a taxon — root-first ordered array from kingdom to the queried taxon's immediate parent (the taxon itself is not included)

Match a species name against the GBIF backbone taxonomy — returns taxonKey, confidence score, and full classification

Aggregate occurrence counts by a dimension — country, year, basis of record, dataset, kingdom, presence/absence, IUCN Red List category

Search GBIF datasets by keyword, type, country, publishing organization, or hosting organization

Search 3.9B+ GBIF occurrence records with Darwin Core filters — country, publishing country, state/province, bounding box, WKT geometry, year, month, basis of record, presence/absence, IUCN Red List category

Search GBIF-registered publishing organizations by name fragment or country

Search or browse the GBIF backbone taxonomy by name fragment, rank, or a kingdom, family, or genus name resolved to its backbone key

to require or exclude georeferenced records

filter for extinct vs. extant taxa

CR, EN, VU, NT, LC, DD, EX, EW, CD

disambiguates a name that appears in more than one kingdom, and is rejected when supplied blank: GBIF drops a blank one and matches against the whole backbone — Parus major resolves to taxon 9705453 with kingdom= exactly as it does with no kingdom at all, where Plantae resolves to 9711704 — so the u

for aggregate datasets (e.g. iNaturalist, eBird)

and numOccurrences for scope at a glance

, full classification (class/classKey), GADM administrative units (levels 0–3, each with a stable GID and name), and source identifiers

PRESENT (default), ABSENT, or ANY. GBIF indexes absence records (a survey that looked for the taxon and did not find it) alongside sightings; the default excludes them and the enrichment says so on every call

carries the original description citation when available

(ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, uppercase) is the country of the publishing organization, not of the observation — a different question from country, and the two disagree on most records: of 60,290,950 records observed in GB, 1,548,928 were published by US organizations

is matched verbatim — exact and case-sensitive, with no controlled vocabulary behind it. Take a value from a STATEPROVINCE facet rather than guessing; an unmatched value returns zero records instead of an error, and the enrichment notice says so when it happens

ACCEPTED, SYNONYM, DOUBTFUL — when SYNONYM, acceptedKey and accepted identify the current name