Dear GBIF API users,

Last year we announced an upcoming change to how the GBIF API would handle ranges in the Darwin Core eventDate field.  Date ranges formatted using the ISO 8601 standard will retain their meaning, and the API will return values like "2000-05" or "2007-11-13/2007-11-15".

The changes have been visible on the test system, GBIF-UAT.org, since late September.  We are currently reprocessing the data for GBIF.org, and expect to make the change visible tomorrow afternoon (around 24 hours from now).

For more information, see the GitHub issue or Discourse discussion:

→ https://github.com/gbif/gbif-api/issues/4#issuecomment-1735378954/

→ https://discourse.gbif.org/t/gbif-api-supporting-ranges-in-occurrence-eventd...

If you find errors with how the eventDate field is processed, for example if processing has failed to handle a well-formatted eventDate, please give feedback in the usual way — with the link on the top right of the occurrence page.  If you have a GitHub account, you can also create an issue (or comment on an existing issue) at https://github.com/gbif/portal-feedback/issues

The new technical documentation website has a page on date and time interpretation: https://techdocs.gbif.org/en/data-processing/temporal-interpretation

Tomorrow's deployment will also support the Darwin Core terms introduced last year, and allow searching using several paleontological terms.

Thanks,

Matt