Biodiversity Data Use

There may be instances where the scientific name does not match any name in the GBIF backbone, perhaps because the species is newly described, or is not within a checklist used by GBIF to construct its backbone. These names are flagged with the TAXON_MATCH_HIGHERRANK flag indicating that the scientific name has not been recognised but that the data point has matched at a higher taxonomic level eg. genus or family. This flag can be used for identifying and filtering for these data. When names have been misspelled or badly formatted, there is also a TAXON_MATCH_FUZZY flag that can be used for identifying and filtering names that can only match the taxonomic backbone using a fuzzy, non exact match.