GBIF vs NASA

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is a keyless REST API for searching species, occurrence, and dataset records aggregated from natural history collections, herbaria, and citizen-science platforms worldwide — its occurrence index alone reports a live count past 3.9 billion records. It's operated by an intergovernmental nonprofit funded by member governments, so querying the API is free; registration is only needed to publish new datasets, not to read existing ones.

NASA's Open APIs give programmatic access to imagery and data from missions across the agency — the Astronomy Picture of the Day, Mars rover photos, near-Earth object tracking, and Earth-imagery archives among them. A free registered key raises the shared DEMO_KEY's 30-requests/hour limit to 1,000 requests/hour. All endpoints return JSON.