This is the next item in a series of experiments with external services.

About GBIF:

What is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility?

GBIF enables free and open access to biodiversity data online. We’re an international government-initiated and funded initiative focused on making biodiversity data available to all and anyone, for scientific research, conservation and sustainable development.

I will not dive into analysis of GBIF services but rather try to think about a simple question:

Provided one can simply highlight taxonomic names, hit the button and download the results into EarthCape Units module, what this can be used for?

1. Explore what GBIF data holds on you taxa of interest
2. Explore results of the search TOGETHER with your own data
3. Plot results of the search with or without your own data on your OWN map (EarthCape can reproject the data on the fly)
4. Clean up GBIF data for own purposes but send errors back to GBIF for more checks.
5. Educational purpose: one can quickly build a database with quite diverse content (when other services are also engaged) starting with e.g. species list or selected area on the map.

What EarthCape could do for GBIF?

1. Provide data export from local databases into GBIF data format (e.g. DwC)
2. EarthCape Server could be used automatically as GBIF data provider.
3. Provide local data clean up facility for data that is already in GBIF.

These are all just thoughts and I am not even sure anything useful will develop from here. It will all depend on user feedback though. Please, give some!