gbif.range

Species ranges can be estimated from expert maps (for example IUCN and EUFORGEN) or with modelling approaches. Expert data, however, remain unavailable for many species, whereas modelling workflows often require substantial technical expertise and large numbers of occurrence records. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) — the largest public repository of georeferenced species observations worldwide — offers a practical alternative, yet retrieving them at scale in R remains cumbersome and translating raw occurrences into ecologically meaningful range maps is not straightforward, as records often contain erroneous coordinates that must be identified and removed before spatial analyses.

gbif.range provides a complete workflow to retrieve, clean, and analyze GBIF occurrence records and generate ecologically informed species range maps. Built around the GBIF backbone taxonomy, the package handles synonym-aware downloads, dynamic tiling for large datasets, and 13 configurable post-processing filters via CoordinateCleaner. Range maps are constrained by bundled or custom ecoregion layers (terrestrial, marine, and freshwater), and can be validated against independent data using built-in evaluation and cross-validation functions. A dedicated disk-based pipeline allows processing very large multi-species GBIF exports without loading them into memory. Additional utilities cover GBIF taxonomy inspection, occurrence thinning, geographic tiling, and GBIF-derived DOI generation.

For full documentation, workflows, and examples, visit the package website.

Installation

# From GitHub (development version)
remotes::install_github("8Ginette8/gbif.range", build_vignettes = TRUE)
library(gbif.range)

CRAN submission coming soon. Once available, the package will also be installable with install.packages("gbif.range").

Quick example

# Download Panthera tigris occurrences
obs.pt <- get_gbif(sp_name = "Panthera tigris")

# Load terrestrial ecoregions and build range map
eco.terra <- read_ecoreg(ecoreg_name = "eco_terra", save_dir = tempdir())
range.tiger <- get_range(occ_coord = obs.pt,
                         ecoreg = eco.terra,
                         ecoreg_name = "ECO_NAME",
                         degrees_outlier = 5,
                         clust_pts_outlier = 4,
                         format = "SpatRaster")

# Plot
countries <- terra::vect(
  system.file("extdata", "world_countries.shp", package = "gbif.range")
)
terra::plot(countries, col = "#bcbddc")
terra::plot(range.tiger$rangeOutput, col = "#238b45", add = TRUE, axes = FALSE, legend = FALSE)

Citation

Yohann Chauvier, Oskar Hagen, Stefan Pinkert, Camille Albouy, Fabian Fopp, Philipp Brun, Patrice Descombes, Florian Altermatt, Loic Pellissier, Katalin Csilléry. gbif.range: An R package to generate ecologically-informed species range maps from occurrence data with seamless GBIF integration. Authorea. June 30, 2025. doi: 10.22541/au.175130858.83083354/v1