EDIT

in these lines of countByTitle() it is obvious:

TaxonBase<?> taxonBase = taxonService.load(occurrenceConfig.getAssociatedTaxonUuid());
if(taxonBase.isInstanceOf(Taxon.class)){
   taxon = HibernateProxyHelper.deproxy(taxonBase, Taxon.class);
}

in the other methods there are things like

        if(config.getAssociatedTaxonNameUuid()!=null){
            taxonName = nameService.load(config.getAssociatedTaxonNameUuid());
        }
        occurrences.addAll(dao.findOccurrencesUuidAndTitleCache(config.getClazz(),
                config.getTitleSearchString(), config.getSignificantIdentifier(),
                config.getSpecimenType(), taxon, taxonName, config.getMatchMode(), null, null,
                config.getOrderHints()));

taxonName may be null but is passed to another method, this needs to be checked

Andreas Kohlbecker wrote:

in these lines of countByTitle() it is obvious:

TaxonBase<?> taxonBase = taxonService.load(occurrenceConfig.getAssociatedTaxonUuid());
if(taxonBase.isInstanceOf(Taxon.class)){
   taxon = HibernateProxyHelper.deproxy(taxonBase, Taxon.class);
}

this one I fixed

as said there definitely an NPE in this code line from above

taxonBase.isInstanceOf(Taxon.class)){

The others should be checked as it is suspect, I did not dig deeper as I had no time for it. You ched it now - good, so we can forget about this part and concentrate on the obvious NPE - seems to be fixed now !

Ahh, correct, there were also the other methods. I corrected the 3rd one now so everything should be correct now. Can we close the ticket?