Search Datasets
gbif_search_datasetsRead-onlyIdempotent
Search GBIF datasets by keyword, type, publishing country (uppercase ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), publishing organization, or hosting organization. The two organization filters answer different questions — publishingOrg matches the organization whose data it is, hostingOrg the organization whose installation serves it — and an organization key from gbif_search_publishers usually wants publishingOrg. Returns dataset title, description, license, record count, and DOI. Use to find the source dataset behind a set of records, or to explore what data collections are available for a taxon, country, or organization.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| q | No | Free-text search across dataset title and description. Omit the field to browse without a term — a blank or whitespace-only value is rejected rather than sent, because GBIF answers a blank one with all 123,527 indexed datasets and a whitespace-only one with none, and neither is the search a caller who filled the field was asking for. | |
| type | No | Filter by dataset type. OCCURRENCE for observation records, CHECKLIST for species lists. | |
| limit | No | Number of datasets to return (default 20, max 1000). | |
| offset | No | Pagination offset. | |
| hostingOrg | No | UUID (8-4-4-4-12 hex, lowercase — matched case-sensitively, as publishingOrg is) of the organization whose installation serves the dataset — not the organization that published it, which is publishingOrg. Most organizations publish through an installation someone else runs, so a key from gbif_search_publishers matches nothing here for them: of the first 25 GB organizations the registry lists, all 25 host no datasets while 13 publish one or two. Supplied together the two filters are intersected, not combined. | |
| publishingOrg | No | UUID (8-4-4-4-12 hex, lowercase — GBIF matches these two keys case-sensitively, so an upper-cased rendering of a real key matches nothing) of the organization that published the dataset — the organization whose data it is, and the question a key from gbif_search_publishers is usually asking. Not the organization that serves it, which is hostingOrg and matches a different set: Butterfly Conservation (0d72dd7f-6f05-46af-85c2-8b6e77ce5534) publishes 3 datasets and hosts none, while the National Biodiversity Network (07f617d0-c688-11d8-bf62-b8a03c50a862) hosts 984 — those 3 among them — and publishes 1. Supplied together the two filters are intersected, not combined, so the same key in both fields returns only what that organization both published and serves. | |
| publishingCountry | No | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, uppercase, of the organization that published the dataset (e.g., "GB", "US", "DE", "SE"). Lowercase and alpha-3 forms ("gb", "GBR") match nothing upstream, which is why only the uppercase two-letter form is accepted here — unlike the country filter on gbif_search_publishers, which resolves either form. Take a value from a PUBLISHING_COUNTRY facet on gbif_occurrence_facets; an uppercase pair GBIF does not assign ("XX") is rejected upstream by name. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| error | No | Present when the call failed. Absent on success. | |
| limit | No | Datasets returned in this page. | |
| notice | No | Guidance when results are empty or paging overshot. Absent on successful result pages. | |
| offset | No | Current pagination offset. | |
| datasets | No | Matching datasets. | |
| totalCount | No | Total matching datasets before pagination. | |
| endOfRecords | No | True when there are no more results after this page. |