Occurrence Datasets: EventDate versus date of data submission

Data Use
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Dear GBIF community,

I am a new user of GBIF so please forgive me if there is an obvious answer to my question. If this is the case, if someone could point me to further reading I would appreciate it.

I am interested in reviewing the GBIF occurrence dataset for all amphibians over the last 5 years. Two questions arose after downloading and reviewing the data (https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.hdhb5x):

  1. I assume that EventDate refers to the date of the observation (for HUMAN_OBSERVATION) or specimen collection (PRESERVED_SPECIMEN). Is this correct?
  2. If the answer to the question above is yes, is it possible to also download the accession / data upload date for the same set of occurrence data? I expect there is a lag for specimen data but perhaps not for observations.

Thanks for any information.
Becca

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You are correct @rdtarvin, the eventDate would refer to the observation date or collection date depending on the basis of record.

I am not sure I understand your second question. Do you mean that you would like to know when the data was uploaded to GBIF?
I can see that your download is associated with 819 contributing datasets. There is no way for you to know exactly when each record was uploaded to GBIF. However, you can get the dataset registration dates (which is when the dataset was first created on GBIF). You can try using our registry API to obtain these dates. Don’t hesitate to contact helpdesk@gbif.org to ask for help.

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