| layout | default |
|---|---|
| title | Home |
Taxonomy deals with the names of living things - well, in this context, we're dealing with living things. So let's call it biological taxonomy.
Almost all biologists are likely to deal with names, whether they study a single species or 10 species, or 10,000 species. Organism names are created by people - thus they are messy of course. Two different names can be given to the same species, and two completely different taxonomic groups could have the identical name at different taxonomic ranks. All these problems and more make it so that you of course want to do your taxonomic sleuthing with a powerful, repeatable, for-loopable, tool.
We created a tool to ease the headache of taxonomy. What makes it possible is the many online taxonomy databases that we can give you an interface to. Take a look at the sources of taxonomic databases we wrap in taxize at the Sources page.
What can you actually do? Let's take a look.
{% highlight coffee %} library("taxize") col_children(name = "Apis") {% endhighlight %}
And you get
{% highlight coffee %} id name rank 6971712 Apis andreniformis Species 6971713 Apis cerana Species 6971714 Apis dorsata Species 6971715 Apis florea Species 6971716 Apis koschevnikovi Species 6845885 Apis mellifera Species 6971717 Apis nigrocincta Species {% endhighlight %}
Awesome eh.
{% highlight python %} import pytaxize pytaxize.col_children(name = ["Apis"]) {% endhighlight %}
{% highlight python %} [ id name rank 6971712 Apis andreniformis Species 6971713 Apis cerana Species 6971714 Apis dorsata Species 6971715 Apis florea Species 6971716 Apis koschevnikovi Species 6845885 Apis mellifera Species 6971717 Apis nigrocincta Species] {% endhighlight %}
Want to see something else added? Open an R or Python issue.