About Faces of Plants

An open-source platform for biodiversity exploration powered by GBIF.

Mission

Faces of Plants makes global biodiversity data accessible to everyone through AI-powered natural language search and interactive mapping. Our goal is to bridge the gap between scientific databases and the public, enabling citizen scientists, educators, and researchers to explore plant distribution data intuitively.

GBIF Data Integration

Faces of Plants is powered by GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. All occurrence data displayed on our maps and search results comes directly from GBIF's public API (api.gbif.org/v1).

We query GBIF's occurrence search endpoint to retrieve georeferenced plant observations from thousands of participating institutions worldwide. This data powers our interactive atlas, species distribution maps, and temporal analysis tools.

How we use GBIF data:

  • • Interactive Map: Real-time occurrence search with clustering, heatmap, and temporal filtering
  • • Natural Language Query: AI converts plain-language questions into structured GBIF API calls
  • • Species Lookup: Direct species information from GBIF's species API
  • • Multi-source Enrichment: GBIF data combined with iNaturalist and EOL for richer context
  • • Caching: DynamoDB-backed cache to reduce API load and improve response times

All occurrence data is attributed to its original sources as required by GBIF's data usage policy. Each data point retains references to the contributing institution and the underlying dataset.

Features

Global Botanical Atlas

Explore plant distribution worldwide with interactive maps powered by GBIF occurrence data.

Natural Language Search

Ask questions in plain language — our AI converts them to structured database queries.

Temporal Analysis

Analyze how species distributions change over time with date-range filtering.

Multi-source Enrichment

Data enriched from GBIF, iNaturalist, and Encyclopedia of Life.

Open Source

Faces of Plants is open-source software released under the MIT License. We believe open science requires open tools. The full source code is available on GitHub.

View on GitHub

Data Citation

When using data from Faces of Plants in publications, please cite the original GBIF datasets. Data accessed through this platform is subject to the GBIF data usage policy.

GBIF.org (2026) GBIF Occurrence Download. Available at: https://www.gbif.org

Built with ❤️ for biodiversity research and education.

Data provided by GBIF.org under a CC BY 4.0 license.