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WoRMS

Science & MathBE

www.marinespecies.org

The World Register of Marine Species REST services from the Flanders Marine Institute: authoritative marine taxonomy with AphiaIDs, synonymy, classification trees, vernacular names, and recorded distributions, used as the taxonomic backbone by OBIS and many other marine systems.

Capabilities (7)

GET /v1/data/worms/children1 credit

Returns the immediate children of a taxon - the genera of a family, the species of a genus - each with AphiaID, name, authority, rank, status and accepted name.

idoffset?
GET /v1/data/worms/classification1 credit

Returns the full taxonomic path from Biota down to the requested taxon as nested child objects, each with AphiaID, rank and scientific name.

id
GET /v1/data/worms/distributions1 credit

Returns where a taxon has been recorded: locality name, higher geography and its Marine Regions ID, record status, establishment means and invasiveness, and free-text notes.

id
GET /v1/data/worms/record1 credit

Returns one taxon record: scientific name, authority, rank, taxonomic status, unaccepted reason, the accepted name and id, and environment flags.

id
GET /v1/data/worms/records-by-name1 credit

Returns the WoRMS record or records matching a scientific name, with AphiaID, authority, rank, status, accepted name and id, and the isMarine/isBrackish/isFreshwater/isTerrestrial flags.

namelike?marine_only?
GET /v1/data/worms/synonyms1 credit

Returns every name WoRMS treats as a synonym of the taxon, with each synonym's AphiaID, authority, rank and the accepted name it maps to.

idoffset?
GET /v1/data/worms/vernaculars1 credit

Returns the vernacular names recorded for a taxon, each with the name, ISO language code and language name.

id

Licence

WoRMS states on its About page: "The text on the WoRMS pages is open-access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). This License permits unrestricted use, provided it is cited as requested on the WoRMS webpages, unless stated otherwise on the individual pages." It carves images out of that grant: "Images are by default open-access under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA license, unless stated otherwise on the individual pages." The REST responses return the same taxonomic text, so CC BY applies: commercial use and redistribution are both permitted with attribution, and no images are served by these capabilities.

https://www.marinespecies.org/about.php

Attribution

Display this wherever you show the data. It arrives on every response as provenance.attribution_text.

Taxonomic data from WoRMS, World Register of Marine Species (Flanders Marine Institute), licensed CC BY. Cite WoRMS as described at marinespecies.org.

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