letsRept🦎 🐍 🐊 🐢

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An Interface to the Reptile Database

This package was developed to facilitate the processes of reptile nomenclature update based on a search for species synonyms according to The Reptile Databse website (Uetz et al., 2025).

Currently, the package access many species information from The Reptile Database using R interface.

I hope it to be useful, to people trying to match databases from different sources (IUCN, species traits database, etc), or trying to get summaries from a given higher taxa or region (e.g.: Snakes from Brazil). But it can also just print single species information directly in R.

Any feedback, suggestion or request are welcome!

Download

To install the stable version of this package user must run:

```{.r}

install.packages("devtools")

devtools::install_github("joao-svalencar/letsRept", ref="main") library(letsRept) ```

To access the full list of functions with clear examples, browse the package vignettes:

{.r} browseVignettes("letsRept")

Internal datasets

• The package counts with a full list of current valid species (allReptiles - 12,440 species) with their respective higher taxa information (updated to 23th of May, 2025);

• A dataset with all unique synonyms for each current valid species (allSynonyms - 53,159 entries - updated to 23th of May, 2025);

• Another synonyms dataset with all entries considering their respective references (allSynonymsRef110,413 entries - updated to 23rd of May, 2025).

Next steps

• [x]   Implement reptAdvancedSearch link testing and result summary
• [x]   Implement reptSynonym batch sampling and tryCatch() mechanism
• [x]   reptSpecies() with parallel sampling
• [x]   reptSynonyms() with parallel sampling
• [x]   CRAN submission (June 14th, 2025)
• [x]   CRAN reviewed submission (June 18th, 2025)
• [x]   CRAN release 0.1.0 (June 23rd, 2025)
• [x]   reptSync upgrade
• [x]   Implement "uptodate" check (reptSplitCheck)
• [x]   Implement Reference sampling (df with links)
• [x]   Implement adapted version of AmphiNom::asw_stats() (Liedtke, 2018)
• [x]   Stable version 1.0.0 CRAN submission (August 18th, 2025)
• [x]   Stable version 1.0.0 CRAN release (August 22nd, 2025)
• [x]   Paper submission (August 18th, 2025)

How to Cite

To cite this package in publications, run:

r citation("letsRept")

⚠️ Important note:

letsRept retrieves valuable taxonomic and synonymy data directly from The Reptile Database.. When citing this package, please also cite the original database as a data source.

References

Liedtke, H. C. (2018). AmphiNom: an amphibian systematic tool. Systematics and Biodiversity, 17(1) 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2018.1518935

Uetz, P., Freed, P, Aguilar, R., Reyes, F., Kudera, J. & Hošek, J. (eds.) (2025) The Reptile Database. http://www.reptile-database.org

Author:

Vieira-Alencar, João Paulo dos Santos (joaopaulo.valencar@gmail.com)

Orcid | Research Gate

Ph.D in Ecology at USP

Post-Doc at: Laboratório de Evolução e Diversidade I - "LED 1" - Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas, Universidade Federal do ABC, São Bernardo do Campo, SP – Brazil