dwcready

Turn the file you have into a Darwin Core Archive

Publishing occurrence records to GBIF means mapping your columns to Darwin Core, building an archive, and usually learning what was wrong only after it has been ingested. We map what we can confirm from your values, build the archive, and list what we refused to interpret — before you submit.

Drop your file here or click to choose  ·  CSV, TSV, Excel, JSON, PDF, or zip

Free until 1 September  ·  no account  ·  your records are discarded after the check — we keep the column mapping, never the rows.
See a sample report if you would rather look before uploading.

How this differs from GBIF's validator

GBIF's validator checks a Darwin Core Archive you have already built. It reports what is wrong with it; it does not map your columns and it does not produce the archive. If you do not have an archive yet, there is nothing for it to validate.

We start from the file you actually have — a spreadsheet, a database export, a workbook — confirm each column against its own values rather than its header, and refuse anything genuinely ambiguous instead of guessing. A column named latitude holding longitudes is a real failure mode, and a name match cannot see it.

How we recommend using it

  1. Read what we refused first. For every column we could not interpret you get one line naming the column, what we found in its values, and why we stopped — for example “sex: nominated, but only 5 of 8 values are in the vocabulary — refused”. Expect a handful of lines, not hundreds: each one is a decision about a whole column. Every refusal carries a code — all 63, with what each one means.
  2. Answer the questions we ask. We only ask when two columns are genuinely ambiguous and only you can settle it. Your answers are applied to your own results.
  3. Run the archive through GBIF's validator before you publish. We do not replace that step and do not claim to.