OpenRefine for Biodiversity Data Cleaning (GBIF Course Materials)

GBIF's curated training resources for using OpenRefine to clean and transform biodiversity data before publishing. OpenRefine is a free, open-source tool that works locally (no data sent online) and is particularly effective for biodiversity data tasks: faceting to identify data quality issues, clustering to detect and merge variant spellings of taxon names, reconciliation against the GBIF backbone taxonomy to validate scientific names, GREL expressions for coordinate validation and transformation, and date parsing for ISO 8601 standardisation. Includes links to official OpenRefine documentation, GBIF-specific tutorials, and community resources. Essential skill for preparing freshwater biodiversity datasets (SASS scores, fish surveys, water quality records) for Darwin Core standardisation and GBIF publication.