Taxa Tree of Life Generator
Export a Taxonomic Tree of Life from authoritative sources
Developed in
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 when crunching through the dataset of species known to humanity is a task suitable for supercomputers only. Still, their 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.
Impact
Update from 2025: it's been 5 years, and this project is still in use to import millions of taxa records.