Accessing EOL's taxonomic tree for all terrestrial arthropods?

Development Harvesting
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1

Hi everybody,

I am wrapping up my Master’s degree in GIS technology at Northwest Missouri State University. I would like to use EOL as part of my thesis project, so I am writing to inquire about the feasibility of my proposal.

My idea is to assess Facebook’s suitability as a potential source of crowd-sourced observation data. I plan to use observations posted to the Entomology Group (Redirecting...)—in part because the posts there are required to contain location information.

It would be really helpful to have a table of taxonomic names for all terrestrial arthropods (i.e., insects and kin in subphylum Hexapoda, millipedes and centipedes in subphylum Myriapoda, all arachnids, amphipods in Family Talitridae, and isopods in suborder Oniscidea). Is there a way that I can access EOL’s taxonomy database to retrieve such a list/tree?

Thanks in advance for any advice!,

Sincerely,

Brian

2

Something like the below (but with the millions of scientific names for all the insects, spiders, etc.):

example
example1174×239 12.5 KB

Thanks again!,
Brian

3

Hi, @Brian ,

You can download the whole EOL classification from this page. I expect you’ll want the “currently active version”, but take your pick! It doesn’t have ranked ancestor columns, but a parent-child construction (first and 5th columns). There are so many rankless nodes out there, this is the only way to store the complete hierarchy. But you can pluck out the Arthropoda by starting at that node and working your way through the children. We have APIs that can deliver the same information, but it sounds like a download would be easiest for your use case.

Good luck!

Jen