Data and location policy

The public site presents country-level occurrence summaries. It does not publish the exact coordinates of animal observations.

What is published

Country and species pages are derived from GBIF occurrence facets. They show aggregate counts, recording history and the countries in which a species has been recorded. Counts reflect recording effort as well as animal presence and should not be read as population estimates.

Why exact locations are withheld

A private research extract includes coordinates and record-level licences, but does not include every field needed for safe public release: coordinate uncertainty, information-withheld and data-generalisation flags, and a complete sensitive-species assessment. Until those checks can be made, exact coordinates stay private.

Gate for any future map layer

• Only records with an explicitly reusable licence may be included.
• A public cell must contain at least 10 qualifying records and cover at least 0.25° by 0.25°.
• Sensitive taxa are limited to country or region only.
• Uncertainty, withholding, generalisation and sensitivity checks must all pass before publication.

The currently recognised reusable coordinate-record licences are 4 explicit CC0 or CC BY forms. Non-commercial records may contribute to the present non-commercial aggregate pages, but they cannot be mixed into a commercial coordinate product.

Taxonomy and provenance

Taxa are joined using the numeric GBIF species API key and a normalised canonical scientific name. Opaque storage keys are not treated as taxonomy identifiers. Each rebuilt document records its schema and data-policy version.

Policy revision: 2026-08-22. This policy is deliberately fail-closed: missing safety or rights information blocks location publication.