Since 2001, the international community has established a consortium, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), to encourage free and open access to primary data on biodiversity (specimens in natural history collections, and field observations of living organisms). In March 2013, nearly 400 million data are accessible via the GBIF portal (data.gbif.org), and is the major portal in this domain. GBIF interacts at the national level with other SI on biodiversity and at the international level with large programs on the environment, like GEOBON.
