GBIF makes 60.75 million fungal records available

A query to the public GBIF API made on 30 July 2026 for taxon key 5 — the kingdom Fungi in the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy — returned 60,461,200 occurrence records. The parameter limit=0 makes the server return only the number of results without downloading millions of rows. The value is a snapshot of a dynamic database and may change after any publication, update or withdrawal of a dataset.

An occurrence record is a documented association of an organism with a place and usually a time. It may come from a herbarium specimen, a field observation, a citizen-science collection, an environmental sequence or another source accepted by the data publisher. It does not automatically mean one individual. The same specimen may have a history of updates, and intensively studied places contribute a disproportionate number of records.

The figure cannot be used as a measure of the global abundance of fungi. GBIF brings together data collected by different methods, with uneven geographical and taxonomic coverage. Countries with active portals and citizen programmes are better represented than regions without digital infrastructure. Species forming large fruiting bodies dominate over many microscopic lineages. Some identifications remain at genus level or higher, and quality filters change the result.

The metric is useful as an indicator of data availability and a starting point for an audit. Any analysis of distribution should record the download date, the full query, the version of the taxonomic backbone and the exclusions applied. That allows the number to be reproduced, or fairly compared with a later snapshot. A striking counter on its own, without a method, does not meet that condition.

What the endpoint actually counts

An occurrence/search query with taxon_key=5 and limit=0 returned 60,750,818 records on 29 August 2026. That is 289,618 more than the 30 July snapshot, an increase of 0.48%. The change describes publishing and updating within GBIF, not growth in environmental fungal abundance.

Within this resource, 27,896,264 records are labelled human observations, 17,343,081 material samples and 14,139,882 preserved specimens. Basis-of-record categories are not quality rankings. A record can represent a specimen, observation or citation; it is neither one species nor necessarily one unique individual.