GBIF Biodiversity Scraper

Search and export GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — into clean JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. Pull species taxonomy (scientific name, rank, full kingdom-to-genus classification, taxonomic status) or occurrence records (geographic coordinates, country, observation date, basis of record, source dataset) for any organism in GBIF's billion-record biodiversity index.

Built for researchers, ecologists, conservation teams and data pipelines that need structured biodiversity data at scale instead of clicking through the GBIF portal one page at a time.

What does the GBIF Biodiversity Scraper do?

Give it a name to search — a scientific name like Panthera leo, a genus, or a common word like oak — pick a mode, and the actor paginates through GBIF and returns one clean row per result:

• Species mode — one row per taxon: scientificName, canonicalName, rank, the full taxonomy (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus), status and numDescendants.
• Occurrences mode — one row per recorded observation: scientificName, country, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, eventDate, basisOfRecord and datasetName.

What data can you get?

Species mode

Occurrences mode

Use cases

• Ecology & conservation research — map where a species has been recorded and how many observations exist over time.
• Taxonomy lookups — resolve a name to its GBIF taxon key and full classification for downstream enrichment.
• Species distribution modelling — pull georeferenced occurrence points for a taxon, filtered by country and year.
• Biodiversity dashboards — feed clean, structured records into your own analytics or mapping tools.
• Education — build teaching datasets of species and their real-world observation records.

How to use it

1. Add the GBIF Biodiversity Scraper to your Apify account and open the input form.
2. Choose a Mode — species for taxonomy, occurrences for observation records.
3. Enter a Search query (e.g. Panthera leo).
4. For occurrences, optionally filter by Country (ISO2 code), Year, and whether records must have coordinates.
5. Set Max items to cap the export, then Run.
6. Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull it via the Apify API.

Input

{
  "mode": "occurrences",
  "query": "Panthera leo",
  "country": "KE",
  "hasCoordinate": true,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Output

{
  "key": 5013750474,
  "scientificName": "Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758)",
  "country": "Kenya",
  "decimalLatitude": -1.399759,
  "decimalLongitude": 34.906483,
  "eventDate": "2013-10-15T00:00",
  "basisOfRecord": "HUMAN_OBSERVATION",
  "datasetName": "iNaturalist research-grade observations"
}

FAQ

What is GBIF? GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is an open-data network that aggregates species and occurrence records from museums, herbaria, research projects and citizen-science platforms worldwide.

How many records can I get? As many as your search returns — GBIF holds billions of occurrence records. Use Max items to cap a run and keep it cheap.

How does billing work? You pay only per record you get, so small, tightly filtered runs stay inexpensive.

What export formats are supported? JSON, CSV, Excel and XML, plus direct access via the Apify API.

Can I use this with n8n? Yes. Run the GBIF Biodiversity Scraper from n8n with the Apify node — trigger a run, wait for it to finish, and read the dataset items straight into your workflow to enrich records, build maps or drive alerts. It also works with Make, Zapier and the Apify API.

Can I connect this to other tools? The GBIF Biodiversity Scraper connects with almost any cloud service or web app through integrations on the Apify platform — Make, Zapier, Slack, Google Drive and many more, plus webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Is this only public data? Yes. It returns only openly published biodiversity data. You are responsible for compliance with GBIF's terms and the licence of each source dataset.

Notes

Original clean-room implementation. Not affiliated with GBIF. Data is contributed by GBIF's publishing network and made available under open licences; cite the original datasets where required.

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.