The Possibilities of GBIF Data Use in Ecological Research

—The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is the largest source of open scientific data on the biodiversity of Russian: over 4.3 million species occurrences became available through GBIF as of May 2020; the most abundant among them are data on vascular plant occurrence (over 1.9 million) and bird occurrence (over 900 thousand). The representativeness of data for other taxonomic groups and most of the regions of the country still remains low, although the amount of available information continues to grow owing to the mobilization of data from scientific collections and personal archives of researchers, as well as from citizen science projects, iNaturalist, and eBird. Data available through the GBIF portal are of great interest to ecologists who work with methods for modeling the spatial distribution of species. However, the existing data gaps for the Russian territory limit the possibilities of their reuse, and it is necessary to address additional sources of information to achieve adequate results.