The origins of GBIF lie in a diagnosis made by the international scientific community in the years following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The newly signed Convention on Biological Diversity created an urgent demand for reliable information about the distribution and status of the world’s species, but the knowledge needed to meet that demand was scattered across a small number of institutions, concentrated overwhelmingly in wealthy countries, with no shared mechanism to bring it together. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Megascience Forum concluded that an international mechanism was needed to make biodiversity data and information accessible worldwide. That conclusion led directly to the establishment of GBIF in 2001, an infrastructure designed from the outset around the principles that would later be formalised as FAIR: data that are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

What began as an effort to digitise the contents of natural history museums has evolved into something far broader. Over 25 years, GBIF has continually expanded to accommodate new kinds of biodiversity information, from digitised natural history specimens and citizen science observations to DNA-based records derived from molecular work. Most recently, the infrastructure has grown to handle structured survey and monitoring data designed to support large-scale biodiversity tracking, allowing researchers to move beyond simple presence records toward understanding population trends over time. In 2026, GBIF adopted the Catalogue of Life as its taxonomic backbone, the result of a multi-year collaboration to build shared infrastructure for reconciling species names across datasets. This taxonomic backbone is technically critical, because the same species can carry many names and the same name can refer to different species; reconciling these labels is what makes billions of heterogeneous records searchable and comparable.

The architecture underpinning this achievement is deliberately distributed. GBIF’s work is carried out through a network of voting country participants and organisational participants, each represented by a national or thematic node that mobilises data, builds local capacity and connects regional biodiversity communities to the global infrastructure. Rather than collecting data into a single central repository, GBIF indexes data that publishers maintain at source. More than 2,700 institutions, including museums, universities, government agencies, citizen science platforms and a growing number of private-sector organisations, have published data through the network, with new publishers joining at a rate of more than two every three days, bringing the total number of organisations involved to nearly 3,500. This model allows a comparatively small coordination office to steward an exponentially growing body of information contributed by thousands of independent institutions.

The scientific return on this investment is measurable and striking. GBIF-mediated data now underpin an average of eight new peer-reviewed research papers per day, and have contributed to more than 15,000 publications to date. The applications span an extraordinary range of fields: climate change research uses occurrence records to model how species ranges shift as temperatures rise; food security studies draw on crop wild relatives data; public health researchers map disease vectors; and invasive species managers track the spread of organisms beyond their native ranges. An independent 2023 assessment estimated that GBIF generates roughly 12 euros in societal benefit for every euro invested, with researcher time savings alone valued at 35 million euros annually. Few scientific infrastructures can document such a direct and quantifiable return on public investment.

The influence of GBIF data extends well beyond academic journals into the machinery of international environmental policy. GBIF-mediated data support multiple indicators under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark agreement through which the world’s nations have committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss. The same records inform assessments by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, two of the most influential bodies in global conservation science. Increasingly, the private sector is also turning to GBIF-mediated data to meet emerging nature-related disclosure requirements, a development that signals how thoroughly open biodiversity data has penetrated from the museum basement into corporate boardrooms and regulatory frameworks.

Dr Joe Miller, GBIF’s Executive Secretary, reflected on the anniversary and the anniversary publication that documents it. He described pride in serving as Executive Secretary at this milestone and in contributing to the publication, which details the history of GBIF both as an infrastructure and a global network. In his view, the article pays tribute to everyone involved in the network across a quarter century, including staff, participants, nodes, volunteers, data publishers and data users, representing the past, present and future of the organisation. He expressed the hope that the paper will help strengthen the network and its capacity to respond to biodiversity data needs both now and in the future.

Yet the anniversary is also an occasion for candour about persistent shortcomings. The global loss of biodiversity continues to be described as a crisis in major international assessments, even as the data infrastructure has improved dramatically. The data themselves reflect long-standing imbalances in the practice of science. Regions with high biodiversity, particularly in the Global South, remain underrepresented, while well-studied, charismatic groups such as birds are heavily overrepresented compared with less visible taxa. Many marine species remain inadequately documented, as do hard-to-identify cryptic habitats and organisms. These are not merely technical problems; they mirror inequalities in scientific funding, institutional capacity and research priorities that have shaped the field for generations.

Closing these gaps was, in fact, part of the original motivation for creating GBIF a quarter-century ago, and the organisation’s own assessment is that the network cannot resolve these asymmetries alone. Doing so will depend on broader shifts in global scientific funding, data culture and capacity, alongside GBIF’s continued efforts to expand its participant network and to diversify the types of data it can mobilise. There is also an ongoing technical challenge of data heterogeneity and quality. Because GBIF indexes data rather than directly vetting every record, it relies on its network of data publishers to maintain quality at source and on users to report issues. This distributed model is what keeps the network scalable, allowing billions of records to flow into a single index, but it is not without friction, and users must remain alert to errors, misidentifications and gaps in even the most comprehensive datasets.

Looking toward its next 25 years, GBIF is guided by its 2023 to 2027 Strategic Framework, which prioritises continued growth of the participant network, expanded support for survey and monitoring data, and deeper integration of DNA-derived biodiversity records, all aimed at closing the longstanding geographic and taxonomic gaps in digital biodiversity data worldwide. The stakes of this work could hardly be higher. As nations race toward the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and as environmental change accelerates faster than traditional monitoring can follow, the ability to see life on Earth in near real time has become indispensable. From a proposal born of a post-Rio data crisis to an index of 3.8 billion records consulted dozens of times each day by working scientists, GBIF’s first quarter-century demonstrates what sustained, open, international cooperation can build. Its next chapter will determine whether the world can finally fill in the blanks on the map of life before they disappear.

Subject of Research: The history, impact and future challenges of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as an open biodiversity data infrastructure

Article Title: GBIF marks 25 years of FAIR biodiversity data, now spanning 70 countries and 3.8 billion records

Article References: GBIF marks 25 years of FAIR biodiversity data, now spanning 70 countries and 3.8 billion records. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: GBIF, biodiversity data, open science, FAIR principles, natural history collections, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, data infrastructure, citizen science, taxonomic backbone, Catalogue of Life, biodiversity policy, data gaps

Nature-based interventions, often abbreviated as NBIs, have proliferated in recent years as policymakers and communities grapple with the twin crises of mental ill-health and environmental degradation. These programmes range from structured green prescriptions issued by health services to participatory science initiatives and community gardening schemes. Despite their wildly different formats, most share two common ambitions: promoting psychological wellbeing and strengthening what researchers call nature connectedness, the subjective sense of closeness to the natural world. Yet the sector has been repeatedly criticised for lacking a consistent evidence base, because countless projects evaluate themselves with different methods shaped by individual funder requirements, producing scattered datasets that cannot be compared, combined, or analysed with any statistical power.

The new study, led by Michael L. Lengieza of Durham University together with Elizabeth Richardson of Natural England and Miles Richardson of the University of Derby, tackles this fragmentation head-on. The team presents a centralised evaluation tool, developed by Natural England, that allows individual projects to administer a standardised survey, enter key features of their programme, and feed participant data into a shared dashboard. Larger organisations gain the ability to combine data across many initiatives, while smaller organisations, which often lack the expertise to design their own evaluations, receive a ready-made solution that removes the burden of survey design, ethics applications, and basic analysis.

As a proof of concept, the researchers pooled data from 75 members of the public who participated in one of eight real-world nature projects and completed both baseline and follow-up surveys. Nature connectedness was measured using an adapted version of the inclusion of nature in self scale alongside the statement-based item measuring how much people feel part of nature, while wellbeing was captured with the Office for National Statistics personal wellbeing questions. Project coordinators also completed a survey describing their programme’s features, including whether they used a recognised delivery framework such as the pathways to nature connectedness.

The results were striking. Using multi-level statistical models with random intercepts for both participants and projects, the team found that nature connectedness increased significantly between the start and end of the programmes across all eight initiatives. But the more revealing discovery emerged when the researchers tested whether the size of that increase depended on programme characteristics. Projects that explicitly employed the pathways to nature connectedness framework, which identifies five routes to connection through sensory contact, emotion, beauty, meaning, and compassion, showed a robust and statistically significant rise in participants’ nature connectedness. Projects that did not use the framework showed only a small, non-significant change, suggesting they might not have been effective at all.

Crucially, the analysis showed that pathways-based and non-pathways-based projects attracted participants with similar baseline levels of nature connectedness, meaning the difference in outcomes could not be explained by one type of programme simply recruiting more devoted nature lovers. The type of engagement, not the type of audience, appeared to make the difference. This pattern aligns closely with the existing academic literature, which has repeatedly shown that actively noticing nature, attending to its beauty, and engaging the senses produce stronger gains than mere time spent outdoors. Analysing any single one of the eight projects in isolation would have been statistically impossible; only the pooled data made the comparison feasible.

The authors are careful to stress what the data cannot show. Because the study lacked experimental control, causality cannot be established. People who seek out nature-connection programmes might be making other lifestyle changes that drive the effect, and programmes using the pathways framework might simply be more enthusiastic or rigorous in ways that matter more than the framework itself. Nevertheless, the researchers note that pre-post time-series designs have a long and respected history in public health evaluation, and that the absence of a change would have more definitively ruled out a causal link. The observed increase, combined with the moderation by framework type, signals exactly where the sector should direct its next wave of controlled experiments and its resources.

The study also offers practical guidance for scaling the approach. Data must include at least one baseline and one follow-up measurement, ideally collected at similar intervals relative to each project’s start and end. Because crowdsourced data will inevitably be noisier than laboratory data, larger samples are essential, and null effects should be interpreted with caution since they may reflect insufficient statistical power rather than a true absence of effect. The tool’s live dashboard, built on Power BI, already gives project managers simple benchmarked summaries of their own performance against the sector, while allowing policymakers and funders to view aggregated results and export datasets for formal analysis.

Looking ahead, the authors envision a modular future for the tool, with optional modules capturing additional outcomes such as physical activity and loneliness, demographic variables, and psychological factors like mindfulness and emotion. They also argue that national and regional bodies, including environmental funders, should move beyond publishing evaluation frameworks and instead provide practical tools that support reporting and data combination. By reducing the evaluation burden on small organisations, the approach frees resources for delivery while building the scalable, policy-relevant evidence base that nature-based interventions need to influence decision-makers at national and international levels, from the Dasgupta Review to the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework.

For a sector long dismissed as fragmented and under-evidenced, the message of this proof of concept is quietly transformative: the collective data of many small initiatives, pooled intelligently, can illuminate what works, guide investment, and ultimately amplify the social and ecological benefits of humanity’s reconnection with nature.

Subject of Research: Crowdsourced evaluation of nature-based interventions using pooled nature connectedness and wellbeing data

Article Title: Amplifying social benefits from multiple nature-based initiatives by crowdsourcing nature connectedness and wellbeing data: A proof of concept

Article References: Lengieza, M. L., Richardson, E., & Richardson, M. (2026). Amplifying social benefits from multiple nature-based initiatives by crowdsourcing nature connectedness and wellbeing data: A proof of concept. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02472-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02472-1

Keywords: nature connectedness, nature-based interventions, crowdsourcing, programme evaluation, wellbeing, pathways to nature connectedness, Natural England, green prescriptions, environmental psychology, evidence-based practice, biodiversity policy, public health