The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international open data research infrastructure, funded by governments. It allows anyone, anywhere to access primary data about all types of life on Earth, shared via the global portal www.gbif.org and through national and thematic portals. GBIF operates through a network of Participant Nodes which coordinates the biodiversity information facilitation of participant countries and organizations. The data are published by many institutions from around the world with full support for the FAIR open data principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). By encouraging and helping institutions to publish data according to common standards, GBIF enables research that could previously not be performed and informs better decisions to conserve and sustainably use the biological resources of the planet.
GBIF was established in March 2001, following a recommendation from the OECD Mega-science Forum in 1999. Norway became a voting member in April 2004. The Norwegian participant node, GBIF Norway (www.gbif.no), established in 2015, is hosted by the Natural History Museum in close cooperation and coordination with the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (NBIC, Artsdatabanken.no). The mission of GBIF Norway is to make information from Norwegian collections and other sources available to the international GBIF network and to coordinate GBIF-related activities in Norway. GBIF Norway contributes to the teaching at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo with a focus on accessing and using species occurrence data. We actively work on improving the quality of the data sets published in GBIF from Norway.
