About
This project explores images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), with support from GBIF, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.
It showcases the value of Linked Open Data for biodiversity images . Coverage of Structured Data on Commons is still incomplete, and you may find many more BHL images in the Flickr gallery and searching in the Wikimedia Commons category.
The project enables filtering by taxa and location to find beautiful, freely licensed images (usually public domain) images. Its main userbase are Wikimedians who are interested in improving Wikipedia articles on biodiversity, thus in addition to the images, a count of the usages around Wikipedias in all languages (and other projects like Wikidata) as well as links to the page about the taxon in four Wikipedia language editions (English, Portuguese, Spanish and French) are shown. These languages were selected due to relevance for African and South American countries, the initial focus of the work.
Data sources
Images come from Wikimedia Commons and were uploaded there from the Biodiversity Heritage Library over the decades by volunteers and staff.
The image metadata was curated as Structured Data on Commons combining volunteer work with a Wikimedian-in-Residence hired from November 2024 to May 2025. There is a nice blog post about this work.
A detailed explanation of the BHL-Wikimedia partnership is available on MetaWiki.
Integration with GBIF
The GBIF species API and occurrence API filters on the main page may return different results. The /species API filter relies on a set of pre-run queries to enrich the dataset with GBIF information on where species occurr, leveraging textual content and country-level information. The /occurrence API will return less results and may take longer, as it runs live requests to GBIF to gather occurrences for the selected taxa in the target region. As this is computationally intensive, and we do not aim for a comprehensive coverage, this option may have less coverage for some groups. GBIF is also used as a source of the Global Occurence Map, which includes occurrences everywhere for the selected taxa.
Code
The source code and issue/bug tracking are available GitHub. Feedback and contributions are welcome! If you prefer, you can also reach out to Tiago directly.
The app is currently hosted at Wikimedia Toolforge, an open hosting environment for tools that provide value to the Wikimedia movement.