Taxa Tree of Life Generator
Convert Taxonomic Tree of Life from various authorities into a CSV file
There are various taxon data authorities that allow downloading their data either one species at a time, or as a huge SQL dump file, which is not practical for some use cases.
I developed a simple tool that allows easy download of a subset of data from GBIF, Catalogue of Life or ITIS as a CSV file.
In addition to being able to specify which Phylums, Genera and Species should be included in the exported file, you can choose among various Infra- and Sub- specific ranks or to include optional metadata to better customize the result to your needs
Online demo
You can try out the live version at taxon.specifysoftware.org.
A demo of Taxa Tree Generator
Screenshots
Technologies used
- PHP 7.4
- Nginx
- Docker
- MySQL
- Bootstrap
- JavaScript
Things learned
Long gone are the days were crunching though the dataset of species known to humanity is a task suitable for supercomputers only. Still, there current implementation of the tool is not the most efficient possible. In fairness, it was designed with features in mind first and foremost, still, performance problems are plaguing the production use of the tool.