Question Regarding API Rate Limits

1

Hello there, great project. I couldn’t find anything immediately pertaining to rate limiting on the API.

I have a project wherein I had originally downloaded the Catalogue of Life dataset, but was missing vernacular names for the entries. I was very happy to find that your dataset included them (side note, I downloaded the dataset from GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, which includes vernacular names, please let me know if there is a better dataset I should be using).

What I also found, however, was your search API, e.g.
v1/species/search?datasetKey=d7dddbf4-2cf0-4f39-9b2a-bb099caae36c&q=cedrus%20deodara
and found it to be quite nice when combined with some of your other fuzzy matching search APIs. So my question is, is it okay to invoke your APIs directly from my application? Are there rate limits to this? Should I be caching when possible? Obviously I will try to do whatever matching I can within my own data, I’m just curous how you guys expect your own API to be invoked.

Thank you

2

You might want to have a look at the GBIF terms of service; Terms of use

As far as I know there is no rate limits on the API. I don’t work at GBIF, but it seems to me like your usecase of the species API is fine. Fuzzy matching vernaculars is one of the usecases it’s used for all the time.

Are you planning to send a lot of traffic to GBIF? Or is this more a small scale thing?