GBIF vs USGS Earthquake Hazards Program

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.

The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program's FDSNWS Event Web Service is a keyless REST API for querying the agency's global earthquake catalog by region, time window, magnitude, or depth, returning real-time and historical seismic event data. Requests default to QuakeML XML but can also return GeoJSON, CSV, or KML via a format parameter, and the whole service is free and unauthenticated, run directly by the federal government.