Science & Nature

What Are Science and Nature APIs?

Science and Nature APIs provide structured access to some of the world's most carefully curated scientific datasets. They cover the living world — species taxonomy, plant and animal identification, biodiversity occurrence records — as well as chemistry, geology, and cross-disciplinary reference data. These APIs serve natural history educators, citizen science platforms, conservation tools, environmental monitoring systems, agricultural apps, and research dashboards requiring machine-readable scientific reference data.

What Developers Build

• Plant identification apps that recognise species from a smartphone photo and return scientific and common names
• Biodiversity survey tools that log species observations with GPS coordinates and sync to GBIF
• Chemistry education apps that display molecular structures, IUPAC names, and safety data sheets by compound name or CAS number
• Agricultural advisory tools that identify crop diseases and pests from field photos
• Nature journalling apps with automatic species enrichment from citizen science databases
• Environmental impact assessments that query species at-risk databases for a given geographic area

Key Science and Nature API Providers

GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is the largest biodiversity data network — 2.5 billion occurrence records from 70,000+ datasets, entirely free via REST API. iNaturalist API provides community-verified species observations and computer-vision identifications from its 3M+ active naturalists. PubChem API (NIH) returns chemical structure, property, and bioactivity data for 115M+ compounds, free and unauthenticated. USGS Science Data Catalog covers geological, hydrological, and geospatial survey data. Wolfram Alpha API provides computable answers for scientific queries across maths, physics, chemistry, and biology — paid but highly capable for calculation-heavy applications.