I have gathered species lists from FWC, GTM, and iNaturalist. Every time I think I’ve found the MASTER list, I find another source of sightings that wasn’t included in the others. At this point, I believe the closest we have to a master list is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). In their own words,
GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility—is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.
In my words, GBIF is a massive spreadsheet that is being fed by thousands of species trackers (3,052 as of this writing), some of which are being fed by hundreds of thousands of species reporters. Those species reports include location, which allows GBIF to plot them on a map. GBIF built a website to show this massive spreadsheet and massive map. They added ways for us to narrow and filter the massive list, which enabled me to pull a list of reports for our lil’ Ponte Vedra.
Of course, I found the official definition of Ponte Vedra to be missing a huge wedge of the estuary, so I drew my own boundary on GBIF’s map.
Can you guess how many species of plants and animals have been reported to GBIF in my fleshed-out frame of Ponte Vedra?
Tap to check your guess
2,427
GBIF is a result of millions of humans documenting millions of sightings of non-humans. No one in that picture is omniscient or infallible. When you get data from GBIF, you have to give it a good scrub down.
I filtered out species that had been reported less than 10 times, like Sasquatch. How many species were left?
Tap to check your guess
527
GBIF might very well be the master list. But something tells me it’s not perfect, and this number will grow and shrink with reality checks.