Hello, I’m trying to download the general trait data for a few particular insect taxa for a manuscript I am working on with some other people. Of most interest to me is the trophic guild, but other listed trait data would also be nice to have. There are few enough taxa that I can get away with just reading through all of them, but the site has been rather slow and has been giving me a lot of 503 errors. Based on other posts in this forum, I believe this is because the migration still hasn’t taken place, but it would be good to know if it’s some other issue.
At first my plan was to click the traitbank, filter for particular taxa, and click “download tsv.” It took a while to process, and unfortunately the downloaded file didn’t seem to include trait data at all, and only had the taxa names.
There were some R packages that I thought might allow me to get the data directly into R like the traits package, but that package recently got taken off of CRAN because one the dependencies of its dependencies was no longer supported. I dug out the function from the github, but the function requires an API key. The only place where I’ve found instructions on acquiring one (here) doesn’t seem to be working, as all I get is:
{
"title": "You are not authorized to use the web services.",
"status": "403 Unauthorized"
}
Notably, this is a different message from what it was when I wasn’t logged in. I think something may have changed and now it’s harder to get an API key? Or API keys aren’t relevant anymore? I see some mentions of the “old API” in the forum but I am not sure what it really means.
I also tried to download the trait data from the open data portal, “All trait data” in particular, but after load.csv’ing it into r and filtering scientific_name only to those taxa I was interested in, all I had left was a paleobiology portal saying the families were still extent, and GBIF saying they were extant in the Republic of Mozambique (that’s how I interpreted it, at least). I think what might be going on is the trait data on the web pages largely coming from different taxonomic categories (i.e. all beetles get labeled as holometabolous and bilaterally symmetric because they are both beetles and bilaterians). If that’s the main barrier, is there a way around it?
In short, I’m having inordinate trouble with this, and that’s everything I have tried. Solutions or more information regarding any of those would be much appreciated.
Best,
Shane