Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) - North American species occurrence data & maps Explore & download North American species occurrence data & maps

Fact Sheet

Poster

USGS Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) is a unique, web-based Federal mapping resource for species occurrence data in the United States and its Territories and Canada, including marine Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). Researchers collect species occurrence data, records of an organism at a particular time in a particular place, as a primary or ancillary function of many biological field investigations. Presently, these data reside in numerous distributed systems and formats (including publications) and are consequently not being used to their full potential. As a step toward addressing this challenge, the Science Analytics and Synthesis (SAS) program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is developing Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON), an integrated and permanent resource for biological occurrence data from the United States. BISON will leverage the accumulated human and infrastructural resources of the long-term USGS investment in research and information management and delivery. Read the DOI Official Press Release in which BISON's public debut was announced.

The USGS SAS program is also the U.S. Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an international, government-initiated and funded effort focused on making biodiversity data freely available for scientific research, conservation and sustainable development. BISON was first released in April 2013 and included 110 million records made available through GBIF from the U.S. and U.S. Territories. In May, 2019, BISON passed the 464 million record count and is continuing to integrate millions more records from other sources each year.

Please send any comments, questions, errors or bugs encountered to bison@usgs.gov

Data Licensing and Value Added Fields

Data provided through Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) can be freely downloaded by users, however, restrictions for its use may vary with different data owners and is described at the record level upon download.

Data licensing is according to Creative Commons, and may commonly be: CC0 1.0 Universal, CC-BY 4.0 International, or CC-BY-NC 4.0 NonCommercial International. It is the responsibility of you, the user, to understand and obey the data licensing for all data you obtain from the BISON website.

The data is owned by the entity described in the OrganizationCode field and has been modified by BISON to provide some additional information, such as ITISscientificName, ITIScommonName, ITIStsn, validAcceptedITIStsn, computedCountyFips, calculatedCounty, calculatedState, mrgid, calculated_waterbody, and/or (if centroid=YES), decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude.

Note:
Maritime Boundaries (EEZ) geospatial data obtained from Marine Regions is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 NonCommercial ShareAlike International license. The vertices of this geospatial data have been simplified to match the scale of other data used in the BISON application.

Data Use Agreement

Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) is committed to providing free and open access to primary species occurrence data. Data currently available through BISON are contributed by various U.S. Federal and State agencies, universities, and non-profit organizations, either directly to BISON or indirectly through their participation in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). GBIF Participants who have signed the GBIF Memorandum of Understanding have expressed their willingness to make biodiversity data available through their nodes to foster scientific research development internationally and to support the public use of these data. GBIF data sharing should take place within a framework of due attribution. Therefore, using data available through BISON requires agreement with the BISON Data Use Agreement that is displayed prior to a data download.

How to cite data retrieved from BISON:

[Data Provider or Owner name]. [Resource or dataset name] published by [Data Provider name, address affiliation(s)] (Accessed through Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON), https://bison.usgs.gov, YYYY-MM-DD)

For example:
Field Museum of Natural History. U.S. Bird Occurrences published by Field Museum of Natural History, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of Washington Burke Museum, and University of Turku (Accessed through Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON), https://bison.usgs.gov, 2007-02-22)

Or

Gordon, J. U.S. Bird Occurrences published by Field Museum of Natural History, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of Washington Burke Museum, and University of Turku (Accessed through Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON), https://bison.usgs.gov, 2007-02-22)