Taxonomic naming authorities from various providers including Catalogue of Life (COL), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
Taxonomic name tables for 7 naming authorities, normalized to a common Darwin Core schema.
Built by the taxadb R package. Generated 2026-08-24.
Reading the data
Each table is one or more Parquet files, named
2026/<schema>_<provider>_part_<n>.parquet.
No special client is needed; anything that reads Parquet will do.
Schema
There are two kinds of table. dwc_<provider> is the complete name list:
one row per name, accepted names and synonyms together. common_<provider>
is the vernacular names, one row per name with the language it is in.
A provider that publishes no vernacular names has no common table; ott
is the one such provider here.
Every dwc table carries these columns, with the same meaning throughout:
column
meaning
taxonID
Identifier for this name, prefixed by the provider, e.g. ITIS:180092. Empty where the provider mints no identifier for a synonym, which is the case for NCBI, OTT, FishBase and SeaLifeBase.
scientificName
The name, without authorship. Present at every rank: Animalia is a scientificName just as Homo sapiens is.
taxonRank
The rank the provider gives this name. Not limited to the seven below: NCBI and OTT recognize over forty.
acceptedNameUsageID
The taxonID of the accepted name. Always populated, on accepted names as well as synonyms, where it repeats the row's own taxonID.
taxonomicStatus
accepted, or what kind of synonym or other usage this is. Provider-specific terms are kept rather than flattened.
kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus
The classification, flattened from the provider's hierarchy.
specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet
Epithets, where the name has them.
Providers add their own columns beyond these; see columns in
manifest.csv for exactly what each table holds.
The one place this is stricter than Darwin Core
Darwin Core leaves acceptedNameUsageID optional on an accepted name, and
most providers omit it there, reasoning that an accepted name is its own
accepted name. These tables always populate it, repeating the taxonID.
That way resolving any name to its accepted identifier is a single column
read with no special case, whether the name turned out to be a synonym or
not. Relatedly, a name the provider redirects nowhere is its own accepted
name even where the provider hedges about it, so GBIF's doubtful and
COL's provisionally accepted names are self-referencing too.
Providers
These are not interchangeable, and should not be combined. Providers
represent independent taxonomic theories: the same name can be accepted by
one and a synonym of something else in another, so two providers can
contradict each other in ways that merging silently discards.
col, gbif and ott are themselves synthesis projects integrating other
checklists; the rest are primary authorities.
CC0-1.0 covers both the CC0 dedications and the works placed in the public
domain by their producing agency (ITIS and NCBI), which impose no conditions
either way. The two FishBase datasets are the only non-commercial ones here;
the other eleven permit commercial use, CC-BY-4.0 ones with attribution.
Attribution means citing the provider -- see Citation below.
Tables in this release
table
rows
size
parts
common_col
176,481
4.97 MB
1
dwc_col
5,425,409
306 MB
1
common_fb
333,251
6.62 MB
1
dwc_fb
103,970
2.82 MB
1
common_gbif
1,500,815
27 MB
1
dwc_gbif
7,746,724
362 MB
1
common_itis
166,832
3.83 MB
1
dwc_itis
993,617
17.9 MB
1
Provenance and checksums
manifest.csv records, for every table, the upstream release it was built
from, its row count, its full column list, and a SHA-256 of each Parquet
part.
The provider abbreviation and this release's version do not by themselves
say what went in, which is why the upstream release is recorded separately:
the GBIF table here is built from the most recent backbone GBIF has
published, which is dated 2023-08-28, and is therefore older than this
snapshot's version suggests.
How this was built
Every table is derived from the provider's own distribution by
taxadb::td_build(), and checked against the schema rules above by
taxadb::td_validate() before publication. Both are ordinary exported
functions, so a table can be rebuilt or re-checked independently:
Citation
Cite the underlying provider, not this redistribution:
itis: Retrieved from the Integrated Taxonomic Information System on-line database, https://www.itis.gov
ncbi: Schoch CL, et al. NCBI Taxonomy: a comprehensive update on curation, resources and tools. Database (2020). doi:10.1093/database/baaa062
ott: Rees JA, Cranston K. Automated assembly of a reference taxonomy for phylogenetic data synthesis. Biodiversity Data Journal (2017). doi:10.3897/BDJ.5.e12581
Norman KEA, Chamberlain S, Boettiger C (2020). taxadb: A high-performance
local taxonomic database interface. Methods in Ecology and Evolution,
11(9), 1153-1159. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13440