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The GBIF Data Portal now contains a tabulation that allows the user to find out how many data records from a country are hosted by institutions or networks within other countries.
This GBIF tool is useful to people who wish to know whether there are data for a particular country available via the GBIF network, and which countries' institutions host such data. It is also useful as a tool to help determine the depth of coverage by the data mediated through the GBIF network for particular countries and taxa. This is something that users have been requesting, and GBIF hopes that these persons find this table helpful.
If someone needs to know what other countries host biodiversity data for Gabon, they could use this table (to find out that Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand Poland, Sweden, USA and one or more international thematic networks are all sharing data on organisms that are found in Gabon.
The opposite is also true: the tabulation can be used to determine, for a given country's institutions, the countries from which specimens and data that they host came. For example, institutions in the Republic of Korea hold data not only for that country, but also for China, Hungary, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and the United States.
The tabulation is presented as an overview matrix, with the cell that is an intersect between two countries marked with the user's choice (via a pulldown menu) of
- an "X", showing that that GBIF-network country does hold data for the country of origin being considered (summary view),
- the actual number of records (detailed view), or
- that number represented as a percentage of all records for the country or territory in question that are available via the GBIF network (percentages view).
Other ways of exploring the data are also possible. Three pulldown menus at the top of the page allow the user to construct a country-by-country query. - Selecting Argentina in the "host" menu, and "all" in the country menu will result in a vertical table (longer than wide) that lists all the countries for which Argentinian institutions that are sharing data via the GBIF network hold data.
- Changing "host" to "all" and "country" to "Argentina" will result in a horizontal table (wider than long) that shows all the countries that are sharing data that are relevant to Argentina.
Clicking on any cell in either of these specialised tables, or in the overview table, results in a popup window that contains a map of all GBIF-mediated data for the country on the left of the table, as well as a statement of the number of records and the percentage of the data for the source country from the particular host country indicated in the query. For instance, clicking on the cell for Great Britain in the horizontal table for Argentina produces the notation that there are currently 1,257 records of Argentinian organism occurrences being shared by institutions in the United Kingdom, and that these account for 0.53% of all the records for Argentina in the GBIF network (which shown on the map above the notes). There are also links that allow for viewing, downloading and printing this selection of data records.
The final link in the popup window is "show breakdown by kingdom", which allows the user to see the data coverage for the country not only by taxonomic group, but also by the type of data--observational, specimen, living, germplasm, fossil or unknown. Thus, the user can ascertain the current depth and breadth of GBIF-mediated data coverage for any country or territory in the world. The tabulation is automatically updated when new data providers come online, and so these measures will change through time.
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