GBIF hosts the largest biodiversity database portal on the internet, exposing data shared by hundreds of institutions worldwide. Funded by governments, through collaboration between its Participant nodes of countries and organizations, and a secretariat based in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) serves as an international open data infrastructure by helping institutions to publish data according to common standards and allowing anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on earth, shared across national boundaries via the internet. GBIF provides a single point of access to more than 1 billion records.

GBIF produces trend charts on data mobilized by GBIF network from the end of 2007 and updates them periodically, approximately quarterly. These charts are available to view through the GBIF country pages (click the country on the map and select the 'data publishing' tab), along with much richer analytics about the data published by national institutions. It should be noted that eBird records were added to each country's dataset in 2018; please see "Limitations and caveats" for more information.

We acquired the record data for all the countries, territories and islands available to date (most recently, October 2019), smoothed the temporal trend by taking the last counts of species occurrence record in each year, and generated the GBIF biodiversity records indicator with yearly intervals for each country that has data available. For each country, the annual change rate was calculated over the time period from the first year when the species occurrence records were available to 2019.