iDigBio vs USGS Water Services

iDigBio is a keyless REST API exposing more than 150 million digitized natural-history specimen records — pressed plants, pinned insects, fossils, and more — contributed by U.S. museums and herbaria under an NSF-funded national digitization effort. Search and summary endpoints return Darwin Core fields (collector, locality, taxonomic name) as JSON, and the same backend powers iDigBio's public specimen-browsing portal.

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.