GBIF vs USGS Water Services

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.

USGS Water Services is a keyless REST API serving real-time and historical streamflow, groundwater, and water-quality readings from thousands of USGS monitoring sites across the US, in WaterML XML, JSON, or the legacy tab-delimited RDB format. The agency has announced it will decommission this API family in early 2027 in favor of its new Water Data APIs (api.waterdata.usgs.gov), with no degradation planned before August 2026 — new integrations should target the successor service.