User Documentation

Welcome to the user documentation of the Netherlands Biodiversity Data Services: a collection of public services for retrieving biodiversity related data from one of the largest natural history collections in the world, present at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Our services provide access to more than 48 million specimen and occurrence records and counts are steadily growing as our large-scale digitization project proceeds.

Resources

Web Services

The Netherlands Biodiversity Data Services are comprised of two main service components:

• The Netherlands Biodiversity API (NBA) is the primary gateway to accessing the digitised Natural History collection at Naturalis.

• The Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) service provides permanent, unique and therefore citeable identifiers for all our records.

Tools

We have developed several tools to ease access to our data:

• the Bioportal is a web application to conveniently browse, query and search our data;

• client libraries provide programmatic access to the NBA;

• the NBA query scratchpad is an online tool for designing and running complex NBA queries.

Further Documentation

• The NBA API endpoint reference site provides detailed information about all NBA services and data models

Version

The current version of the NBA is v2. The previous version (v0) has been deprecated since May 2018.