SCS vs GBIF Nearby

Discover cetaceans around the world with SCS – Swiss Cetacean Society! Explore each species with detailed profiles, high-quality images, and immersive audio recordings. This simple and intuitive app helps you identify each cetacean, understand their behaviors, and learn about their distribution worldwide. Available in multiple languages, it raises awareness about cetacean protection and the preservation of marine ecosystems.

Discover the biodiversity around you. GBIF Nearby turns your phone into a window onto the species that have been recorded near your current location. Whether you're on a hike, in your backyard, or visiting somewhere new, the app shows what wildlife scientists, museums, and citizen observers have documented in the area — drawn live from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the world's largest open database of biodiversity records with over 3 billion occurrences. Five ways to explore • Map — A density heatmap of occurrence records around you, with tappable pins at close zoom that open the underlying record. • Species — A ranked list of the species recorded nearby, with record counts and photos where available. • Gallery — A scrolling photo grid of recent occurrences in your area. • Datasets — The GBIF datasets contributing data near you, with one tap to learn about each source. • About — What the app does, what GBIF is, and your settings. Adjustable to your interest A persistent header lets you change the search radius from 100 meters to 100 kilometers, and filter to All life, Animals, Plants, or Fungi. Choose your distance unit (metric or imperial) and the language used for common names. Built for curiosity GBIF Nearby is an educational, non-commercial app aimed at students, naturalists, hikers, teachers, and anyone curious about the living world around them. It is a doorway into open biodiversity data — every record links back to its source on GBIF, so you can dig deeper, cite responsibly, or contribute back to the dataset that produced it. Privacy-respecting The app uses your location only to query GBIF for nearby records. No accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no advertising. Your location never leaves your device except as part of the GBIF query itself. Data source All biodiversity data comes from the public GBIF API. GBIF is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments, providing free and open access to biodiversity data. Learn more at gbif.org.