Monday 27 February 2017

GBIF Backbone - February 2017 Update

We are happy to annouce that a new GBIF Backbone just went live, available also as an improved Darwin Core Archive for download. Here are some facts highlighting the important changes.

New source datasets

Apart from continuously updated source like the Catalog of Life or WoRMS here are the new datasets we used as a source to build the backbone.




The 43 sources used in this backbone build

Code changes




All other fixed issues in the source code that generates the backbone can be found in our Jira epic
and github milestone.

Backbone impact

The new backbone has a total of 5,887,500 names of which it treats 2,818,534 species names as accepted (up from 5,307,978 and 2,525,274 respectively).
More backbone metrics are available through our portal and in more detail through our API.


  • 105,296 deleted names, many of them previous erroneous duplicates
  • 685,853 new names
    • Animalia: 164 families; 6,616 genera; 257,196 species; 87,660 infraspecific
    • Archaea: 2 families; 6 genera; 48 species
    • Bacteria: 27 families; 225 genera; 2,470 species; 615 infraspecific
    • Chromista: 2 phyla; 13 classes; 58 order; 54 families; 767 genera; 12,124 species; 2,953 infraspecific
    • Fungi:  2 families; 269 genera; 8,703 species; 2,993 infraspecific
    • Plantae: 3 families; 795 genera; 63,617 species; 33,282 infraspecific
    • Protozoa: 4 families; 65 genera; 1,412 species; 280 infraspecific
    • Viruses: 8 families; 1,227 genera; 8,488 species
    • Unknown: 4 families; 2,708 genera; 13,076 species; 2,237 infraspecific

A very large and detailed log of the backbone build is also available.

The largest taxonomic groups in the backbone, exceeding 3% of all accepted species is shown in the following diagram:


All contributors to the backbone arranged by number of names the source serves as the primary reference:


Occurrence impact

With a new backbone we have reprocessed all of our 712 million occurrences.

The distribution of the major taxonomic groups exceeding 3%, i.e have a minimum of 36.800 species, is shown in this last diagram:


The 1,226,520 accepted species in GBIF occurrences (140 less than before) represent 44% of all accepted backbone species.