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
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
Anonymous
David,
Can you give this another try?
Thanks
Jeff
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!
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.
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