News

Latest updates

2026

Notification on Catalogue of Life Annual release

Publication of COL Annual release moved to December.

rcol: an R client for the Catalogue of Life

A new R package, rcol, brings Catalogue of Life name matching, taxon and dataset lookups, tree navigation and the ChecklistBank parsers straight into R — modelled on rgbif and taxadb.

A vision comes to Life

Catalogue of Life is the main taxonomic reference for GBIF

Distribution maps, gazetteers, and how to publish your own

The new taxon distribution map draws structured distributions and an optional GBIF occurrence overlay. Here is how the col-gazetteers project underpins it — and how to publish distributions that the map can actually draw.

Portal components v2: a major, breaking release

The col-browser ReactJS components have moved to React 19 and a fully controlled API. Pin to v1 to keep your pages working, or upgrade to the more flexible v2.

Catalogue of Life now on the iPhone

A free Catalogue of Life iPhone app is now available on the App Store — browse, search and explore the full COL checklist from your pocket.