What is it?

A QGIS plugin to directly download and import GBIF occurrence data from the application interface.

Tutorial

Installation

1. Launch QGIS
2. In the main menu, go to Plugins -> Manage and install plugins...
3. In the All tab, search for GBIF occurrences
4. Select the plugin and click on Install plugin

Use

1. Open the extension window from the main menu: Vector -> GBIF Occurrences -> Load GBIF Occurrences (alternatively, use the icon in the toolbar).

2. Fill in the details about yout search (for example: betta splendens occurring in Thailand) and click "Load occurrences".

3. Done! You'll notice a new QGIS layer for your occurrences. All details known by GBIF are also available as attributes.

Limitations

• More filters should be implemented.
• The plugin is not yet compliant with GBIF and QGIS recommendation (data citation, limit usage of external libs like requests)
• No translation
• Documentation limited
• Due to limitations of the GBIF API, searches are limited to 200,000 records.

Changelog

Since July 2024 there has not been any development on this plugin. Yet it was still one of the most used QGIS plugin for biodiversity data. Another developer, Jules Grillot, joined the development 2 years after the last commit to update the plugin for newer version and add some features :

• Add more filters (extent, date not only based on year but on day and month)
• Improve UI (quick and advanced search, use appropriate QWidget, add tooltip)

Status

First release ok! Feel free to report any bug or feature requests (or even better, contribute to improve it!)

We are now working on a new release compatible with QGIS4. A roadmap is coming soon, to guide the future development and the potential contributors.

Running tests:

The test/ directory holds legacy unittest suites that mock the GBIF API with httmock. They must run under QGIS's own bundled Python, which provides the qgis, PyQt and QtTest modules (there is no make test target).

Running the tests on macOS is currently difficult, because the Kyngchaos QGIS packages embed PyQt without the QtTest module.

How-to release:

Releases are automated with qgis-plugin-ci and GitHub Actions. In short:

• Bump version= and update the changelog= block in qgisgbifapi/metadata.txt, then merge to master.

• Push a bare version tag (no v prefix), matching the version you set:

  $ git tag 0.4.1 $ git push origin 0.4.1

Pushing the tag triggers the workflow, which builds the zip, creates the GitHub release, and publishes to plugins.qgis.org. See RELEASING.md for the full process.