taxize

taxize provides programmatic access to taxonomic data from multiple online databases for retrieval and manipulation of taxonomic names, identifiers, hierarchical relationships, and synonyms.

Key Features:

• Integration with Multiple Data Sources: Connects to 13 diverse online taxonomic data sources for retrieval of taxonomic information.
• Hierarchical Taxonomy Access: Enables access to and traversal of taxonomic hierarchies to obtain parent and child relationships among taxa.
• Comprehensive Taxonomic Operations: Fetches downstream and upstream taxonomic names, acquires taxonomic synonyms, and converts between scientific and common names.
• Reproducibility via R: Exposes taxonomic data access and operations within the R programming environment to support reproducible analyses.

Scientific Applications:

• Species Identification and Verification: Verifies species names and obtains standardized identifiers from multiple taxonomic databases.
• Taxonomic Classification Studies: Constructs and analyzes taxonomic hierarchies for biodiversity and evolutionary biology research.
• Data Integration and Synthesis: Aggregates taxonomic information from multiple sources to support meta-analyses and large-scale ecological studies.

Methodology:

Interfacing with web APIs of various taxonomic databases and exposing their functionality through an R package interface.