Description

Returns a list of orders, families and species which are covered by Neotropical Birds Online as well as the status of each species account in Neotropical Birds. This API is meant to serve as the data behind the user interface of Species lists and Taxonomic Trees and can be used to generate links to species accounts.  The list is returned in taxonomic order base on the Clements world taxonomy.
This is part of the Neotropical Birds version 1.0 API.

Usage Notes

Species accounts which have both article-complete and article-stub value of 0 may or may not exist in the Neotropical Birds site.  Only accounts which have a designation of article-complete=1 or article-stub=1 will be guaranteed to have a species account.  Do not link to any account which has both article-complete and article-stub value of 0

URL

Base URL

http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/ws1.0/ref/taxa

Result Fields

Field (XML)

Attribute

Description

taxon-list

 

Parent tag


template-url

Partial URL to be combined with the species id to construct a link to a Neotropical Birds species account


locale

locale of the response, Current support for en_US only

order

 

Taxonomic rank of Order


sci-name

Scientific name of the Order


has-complete

0/1 boolean flag designating whether this Order contains any complete species accounts


has-stub

0/1 boolean flag designating whether this Order contains any "stub" or partial species accounts

family

 

Taxonomic rank of Family


sci-name

Scientific name of the Family


has-complete

0/1 boolean flag designating whether this Family contains any complete species accounts


has-stub

0/1 boolean flag designating whether this Family contains any "stub" or partial species accounts

species

 

Taxonomic rank of Species


com-name

Common name of this species in the locale from the taxon-list tag


sci-name

Scientific name


article-complete

0/1 boolean flag designating whether this species account is complete


article-stub

0/1 boolean flag designating whether this species account is a partial account or "stub" account


id

species "id" concatenated to the end of the template-url to generate the species account link

Example Responses

XML

<taxon-list template-url="http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/species/overview?p_p_spp=" locale="en_US">
   <order sci-name="Struthioniformes" has-complete="0" has-stub="1">
      <family sci-name="Rheidae" has-complete="0" has-stub="1">
         <species com-name="Greater Rhea" sci-name="Rhea americana" article-complete="0" article-stub="1" id="55956"/>
         <species com-name="Lesser Rhea" sci-name="Rhea pennata" article-complete="0" article-stub="0" id="56116"/>
      </family>
   </order>
   <order sci-name="Tinamiformes" has-complete="1" has-stub="1">
      <family sci-name="Tinamidae" has-complete="1" has-stub="0">
         <species com-name="Tawny-breasted Tinamou" sci-name="Nothocercus julius" article-complete="0" article-stub="0" id="56276"/>
         <species com-name="Highland Tinamou" sci-name="Nothocercus bonapartei" article-complete="1" article-stub="0" id="56436"/>
         <species com-name="Hooded Tinamou" sci-name="Nothocercus nigrocapillus" article-complete="0" article-stub="0" id="56596"/>
         .
         .
         .
      </family>
   </order>
</taxon-list>

5 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Is this API still hosted? I can't find any way of calling the service successfully. I'm making a small program where I want to include a link to a bird's page (if there is one) at http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/. I'm hoping to download the taxa list so that I can map naps to Cornell species numbers. For example "Ara severus" to species number 54356. From there, it's easy enough to calculate the path to the overview page, if it exists.
    If there's a different API to try, that's also fine.
    Thanks for any help or suggestions.
    Is this API still hosted? I can't find any way of calling the service successfully. I'm making a small program where I want to include a link to a bird's page (if there is one) at http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/. I'm hoping to download the taxa list so that I can map naps to Cornell species numbers. For example "Ara severus" to species number 54356. From there, it's easy enough to calculate the path to the overview page, if it exists.

    If there's a different API to try, that's also fine.

    Thanks for any help or suggestions.

    -- David Adams

    1. Anonymous

      David,

        Can  you give this another try?   

        Thanks

           Jeff

      1. Anonymous

        Great, it's working now. The file seems to have 4,125 species. I can easily extract the species names and IDs from here.

        Thanks very much!

  2. Anonymous

    I got an email this morning reminding me that the accounts at the neotropical bird site are updated regularly. I did a fresh download of the XML document that describes the state of the species accounts and have found some odd results. Consider, for example, Muscovy Duck:

    <pre> com-name="Muscovy Duck"
    sci-name="Cairina moschata"
    article-complete="0"
    article-stub="0"
    id="67911"</pre>

    It says that there is neither a full account nor a stub account. In reality, it looks like there is a full account:

    http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/species/overview?p_p_spp=67911

    Has the XML file been updated recently to reflect the current state of the articles?

    Idea: Could you add a modified date to the XML contents to make it easy to see if the file has been changed? That would make caching possible.

    Thanks very much for the great resource.

    1. Anonymous

      The Muscovy Duck account is "in the works" so it's still considered as an empty account.  Once it's been reviewed by our editor, it'll be changed to a complete account.   Re the modified date, I'll look into adding that in the next few days.

        Thanks

           Jeff