Biodiversity studies are relying increasingly on primary biodiversity records (PBRs) for modelling and analysis. Because biodiversity data are frequently harvested-i.e. not collected by the researcher for that particular study, but obtained from data aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility-researchers need to be aware of strengths and weaknesses of their data before they venture into further analysis. R is becoming a lingua franca of data exploration and analysis. Here, we describe an R package, bdvis, which facilitates efforts to understand the gaps and strengths of PBR data with quick and useful visualization functions.