Dear GBIF API users,

We are pleased to announce that we are preparing to move a new taxonomic backbone into production.

This is the first revision of the backbone for quite some years, which will bring the GBIF backbone up to date with latest data sources, such as the Catalogue of Life 2016 (January edition) along with fixes for the many issues you have reported since 2013.  You can read more about the backbone taxonomy rewriting on http://gbif.blogspot.com/2016/04/updating-gbif-backbone.html

This requires some significant processing within the GBIF.org system as we'll be rerunning all quality control routines on all data - this means other improvements may also take effect across older data.  While GBIF.org will remain operational to users during this time, crawling will be paused.  We expect to start this process today, and during next week the changes will be visible in production, after which crawling will resume.

Thank you all for your patience, and providing the data, feedback and submitting the issues that have allowed this.  

We'll report here as changes come into effect.  

More soon,

The GBIF dev team