The GBIF node community is the heart and soul of GBIF's activities at national, regional and global scales, and the new GBIF network page provides a fresh take on navigating essential details about our Participant countries and organizations, as well as non-member countries.
The map clearly focuses on GBIF's national members. Click on any of the coloured countries, and you'll get a quick abstract showing the main national contacts and counts of its endorsed data publishers, occurrence datasets and records. But selecting a greyed-out, non-member country will also highlight any available data resources.
Below the map, you'll find contact information for the elected representatives of the global nodes community and a complete list of all GBIF Participants (sortable by any column). But for member and non-member nations alike, the map on the network page now provides the most direct path to the detailed information pages we maintain for all of the world's countries, islands and territories (some tips on those will follow later this week). Just follow the links embedded in the country names at the top of any pop-up summary.
The network page also provides quick access to GBIF's six regional networks, and the tabs above the map show the way. Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and Oceania—click your pick, and the map will zooms to display the region. The rest of the page refreshes as well, displaying contact information for the region's node representatives and a Participant list refreshes to show the region's members.
Even in this simple presentation, the addition of this regional view fulfills a long-standing request from the nodes community to represent their largely self-organized and self-organizing activities. We're eager to hear suggestions on how to build on this view and display additional information consistently across all regional pages. As with all feedback, just click the chatbox in the upper right of every page.