Darwin Core · dwc:basisOfRecord
What you are seeing BASIS_OF_RECORD_INVALID
basisOfRecord is a controlled vocabulary — a closed list of values, not a description. Anything outside the list is rejected, and near-misses are the usual cause: sighting, field observation, specimen, photo, survey and iNaturalist all mean something perfectly clear to a person and nothing to the ingest.
The accepted values are HumanObservation, MachineObservation, PreservedSpecimen, FossilSpecimen, LivingSpecimen, MaterialSample, MaterialCitation, Occurrence, Literature, Observation and Unknown — eleven, and that is GBIF's own enumeration, checked against their live API rather than transcribed from memory. Case and spacing do not matter to us; membership does.
Most field records are HumanObservation. A camera trap, an acoustic recorder or a satellite tag is MachineObservation. A museum skin, a pressed sheet or a pinned insect is PreservedSpecimen. If you genuinely do not know, Occurrence is the honest parent term and is better than picking one at random.
We will not translate your values for you. When a column nominated as basisOfRecord holds values outside the vocabulary, we refuse the column and name the vocabulary rather than mapping sighting to HumanObservation. That mapping looks obvious and is a guess about what somebody else meant — and in a dataset where sighting distinguishes a visual record from a call heard but not seen, it is the wrong guess. The refusal tells you what we could not settle; the substitution would not have told you anything.
Drop the file in and we will check the column against the vocabulary value by value, tell you how many are outside it and which ones, and refuse rather than silently substitute. Free until 1 September 2026, 00:00 UTC · no account · your rows are discarded after the check.
Check the file you have →Measured on a file GBIF had already accepted and served — their validator asks will this load, and it had. Every figure is read from ops/data.json, never typed here. We issue no rating and no seal — each finding names the rule it applied.