A checklist dataset is a bit of a catch-all term describing any dataset that contains primarily a list of taxanomic names. The lines between a checklist dataset and an occurrence dataset can be blurry.
Since some organizations and countries are already using GBIF occurrences as de facto checklists, maybe national checklists are the land line telephone of biodiversity data and eventually the occurrences in the GBIF network will become the national checklist for a region.
I agree, I think that a lot of countries are skipping the “checklist” step and go straight to collect occurrences instead.
This clearly shows that using checklist to identify data gaps is limited. This could be a good idea for some regions but not everywhere. The problem is that in most cases, when we are missing occurrences, we are also missing checklists. This is never ending. In these cases, the approach that you mentioned in your other post (Hunger mapping) would make more sense.
On the other hand, we have also datasets of Checklist that have Occurrence as extensions, to have the support evidence for each species on the list (e.g MamĂferos de Colombia). It’s necessary to have better guidelines about how we are building and publish Checklist through GBIF.
I agree. There are many such examples where things could be either a checklist or an occurrence dataset. There has been some discussion that labels need to be more flexible and a dataset could have multiple labels.
For the GBIF Backbone I have the feeling that for most entries country tags are not specified. I investigated the distribution.tsv. While filtering for Norway there are 224.243 entries which sounds reasonable, for Italy there are only 5.221 entries. Germany has even less: 2635. (Germany has already 3500 native plant species (depending on source)).
I found out that on iNaturalist, which is feeding GBIF, groups like biodiversity of Germany have more than 25k species listed. It seams that nationality is not transferred to GBIF.
Is it possible to access the checklists via api as well? I was not able to find it.
Hi @phelbach,
You are correct, the information for distribution in the backbone checklist is very limited. Many regional checklists will have more complete distribution extensions.
You can access checklists content via the Species Search API: /species/search (you need to use the datasetKey parameter to specify the checklists then once you have the species keys, you can use /distributions, for example https://api.gbif.org/v1/species/141117231/distributions).
Alternatively, you can also use the checklistbank web interface and API. See for example, the export (download) function: COL ChecklistBank API.
I hope this helps.