For a visualization like this, the place to start is probably the most recent monthly data snapshot which is available on AWS/Google/Azure's open data portals: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence-snapshots

e.g. start with a DuckDB query:

   SELECT scientificName, individualCount, year, month, day, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, issue
   FROM read_parquet('s3://gbif-open-data-eu-central-1/occurrence/2026-09-01/occurrence.parquet/*')
   WHERE class = 'Aves';

https://duckdb.org/docs/current/sql/query_syntax/grouping_se...

As an example from the list, "Aedes albopictus Is Rapidly Invading Its Climatic Niche in France: Wider Implications for Biting Nuisance and Arbovirus Control in Western Europe" [3] cites 5348 iNaturalist records.

[1] https://www.gbif.org/literature-tracking

[2] https://www.gbif.org/resource/search?contentType=literature&...

[3] Paper https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70414 citing GBIF data download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.gzdq3f

PS we are recruiting an engineer, but the deadline for this position is today: https://gbif.link/senior-data-engineer

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) | Senior data engineer | Copenhagen, Denmark | REMOTE

GBIF is an international organization and open-data research infrastructure, whose purpose is to make scientific biodiversity data available to all on the Internet. Multiple research papers are published every day citing this data.

See https://www.gbif.org/ for our public biodiversity data platform, including its open-data API built using a Hadoop cluster and Elasticsearch. All our code is open source and on GitHub [https://github.com/gbif/].

We have two positions:

- a software developer (onsite) for the backend systems (Java, Elasticsearch) https://www.gbif.org/news/2b6mW6uaebea3cZUfXIxog/gbif-is-rec...

- a data engineer (remote) focused more on the Hadoop-based data pipeline and biodiversity data https://www.gbif.org/news/5oePaOpxHplJsbw57BIdK9/gbif-seeks-...

If anyone who can fix that is reading, there's an issue here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNGSITE-471

You might be interested in the snapshots we make available in Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence-snapshots

Or the API: https://www.gbif.org/developer/summary

GBIF is an international organization and open-data research infrastructure, whose purpose is to make scientific biodiversity data available to all on the Internet. Several research papers are published every day citing this data.

See https://www.gbif.org/ for our public biodiversity data platform, including its open-data API built using a Hadoop cluster and Elasticsearch. All our code is open source and on GitHub.

We're looking for an SRE/DevOps engineer who can upgrade and improve our data cluster and other infrastructure. The ideal candidate will also be comfortable working on the Java applications running on the cluster.

The salary is €91k per annum, and as an intergovernmental organization it's exempt from Danish income tax. Staff are recruited on the broadest possible geographical basis, and a visa is no problem at all.

https://www.gbif.org/news/GFYcHp4sJuCvnn6b8UM8e/gbif-secreta...

https://www.gbif.org/ ; https://github.com/gbif/

GBIF is an international organization and open-data research infrastructure, whose purpose is to make scientific biodiversity data available to all on the Internet.

See https://www.gbif.org/ for our public biodiversity data platform, including its open-source and open-data API built using Hadoop cluster and Elasticsearch.

We're looking for an SRE/DevOps engineer who will update and improve our data cluster and other infrastructure.

The salary is competitive, and as an intergovernmental organization it's exempt from Danish income tax. Staff are recruited on the broadest possible geographical basis, and a visa is no problem at all.

https://www.gbif.org/news/7MZC6usRc9SNMLlN2znfLK/gbif-secret...

I hacked around with OpenMapTiles to generate vector tiles in Arctic, Antarctic and WGS84 projections (the latter with 2×1 tiles at zoom 0) [1]. The time spent waiting for PostGIS to do reprojections etc made development very slow, and I've put off updating the tiles.

This tool is reprojects from WGS84 to Web Mercator while reading the tiles, so optimistically changing that would be much of what's needed.

[1] See the map at the bottom of gbif.org, there's a button to change the projection

With data from GBIF you would have almost all of the British records published on the NBN Atlas (about 100 are not shared), plus 2,300 more from other sources.

→ https://www.gbif.org/species/5242507

We've integrated it with PO4A[0] and CrowdIn.com to support a translation workflow, and so far have one document in Chinese: [1].

Another (tiny) example is [2] with an emoji star, you can "Edit this page" and see the Unicode source.

[0] https://po4a.org/

[1] https://docs.gbif.org/collections-idea-paper/zh/

[2] https://ipt.gbif.org/manual/en/ipt/2.5/data-hosting-centres#...

[1] https://data.maptiler.com/downloads/dataset/osm/

Later, we somehow attached my camera to the telescope -- it must have just screwed on to the front, as you would attach a filter, since it's not a DSLR with a removable lens. It does have an excessively long zoom (600mm, it's a Sony RX10 Mk IV).

It took some fiddling to get the two devices to work together. We had to realign the telescope by finding stars on the camera's screen, work out where to manually focus the camera, and what settings (noise reduction etc, as well as ISO, aperture, shutter speed and so on) to use.

Combined, we were able to take these photographs of some nebulae[2-3] and a galaxy[4]. I don't remember, but I think the point was that these were not visible just by looking through the telescope.

It's a reasonably expensive camera, but gave noticeably better results than the astronomer's own Canon EOS 760D. If you don't have something similar, try borrowing a friend who likes wildlife / bird / sport photography or similar.

[2] https://matt.blissett.me.uk/photos/2018/2018-09-04-1/13.jpg?...

[3] https://matt.blissett.me.uk/photos/2018/2018-09-04-1/12.jpg?...

[4] https://matt.blissett.me.uk/photos/2018/2018-09-04-1/17.jpg?...

(All are 30s exposures at f4 with ISO 8000. Remove the ?w=2400&h=1800 if you want to see the original size. If someone recognizes the nebulae and galaxies, please let me know what they are -- I lost the notes I took at the time.)

I was going to give the synonyms for Solanum tuberosum L., the potato, but it has tens (maybe hundreds) of them. Look at the bottom of the infobox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato

There might be other sources, but I don't know about all of these in detail, so I'm not sure. Several of those sources have their own APIs, I think this service's offering is joining everything together.

[1] https://docs.trefle.io/reference

  aspell -d en_GB-ize-w_accents list < file-to-check

GNU Aspell has several variants of "British English", including "British English (United Kingdom) [-ize suffixes and with accents]". KDE seems to use the same dictionary, so in KDE applications I have full support for "Oxford spelling".

There's a Firefox extension which includes -ize endings, but also includes -ise endings, so it's less useful.

[1] http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed-guidelines/style/spel...

[2] http://aspell.net/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british-engli...

For general wild plants and animals (and fungi and everything else) there's a computer vision tool from iNaturalist, which can be used independently [1], or when submitting an observation to the site -- by web browser or in the app. I usually start with that, then look at other observations on iNaturalist and Wikipedia pages for the species.

If the photos are of ornamental plants, I think PlantNet's [2] model is trained on them.

(I work at GBIF[3], where suitable data from iNaturalist[3b] and soon PlantNet is sent, and can then be freely downloaded and used in research etc.)

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo

[2] https://plantnet.org/

[3] https://www.gbif.org/

[3b] https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...

In 1992, on a 640x480 CRT, fonts rendered on RISC OS were excellent. Losing this when I switched to Windows around 1995 was a big step backwards.

NB if viewing on a HiDPI screen, the browser will blur the image at it scales it for the webpage. Instead, look at [2] and zoom the page to 50% -- that's exactly how I remember it, except half the size.

[1] https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/#text

[2] https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/Text--AA-sub-pixel.png