taxadb

The goal of taxadb is to provide fast, consistent access to taxonomic data, supporting common tasks such as resolving taxonomic names to identifiers, looking up higher classification ranks of given species, or returning a list of all species below a given rank. These tasks are particularly common when synthesizing data across large species assemblies, such as combining occurrence records with trait records.

Existing approaches to these problems typically rely on web APIs, which can make them impractical for work with large numbers of species or in more complex pipelines. Queries and returned formats also differ across the different taxonomic authorities, making tasks that query multiple authorities particularly complex. taxadb creates a local database of most readily available taxonomic authorities, each of which is transformed into consistent, standard, and researcher-friendly tabular formats.

- R
Published by cboettig almost 6 years ago