The taxon function has no method to pass a taxon ID directly

[tpoisot]

Currently, taxon performs only text search, but sometimes the ID of the taxon is known (for example, when we want the genus of a given species). This would require a second method.

The taxon function is defined here: https://github.com/EcoJulia/GBIF.jl/blob/master/src/taxon.jl

The GBIF API endpoint for taxa by ID is here: http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/216

[MichielStock]

@tpoisot Let's see if I can do this in half an hour!

[tpoisot]

🎉 make your PR on master, and @ me if you have questions!

[MichielStock]

I don't have much experience with querying a database:

• Should I write a function with method taxon(taxonID::Int) to indicate that we have a key?
• So the args would be args = Dict{String, Any}("name" => 216, "strict" => strict, "verbose" => verbose)
• line 68

   sp_s_url = gbifurl * "species/match"

should then be

   sp_s_url = gbifurl * "species"

This is how I understand it from the API, though the body which is collected always matches WELP....

Can you point me in the right direction?

[tpoisot]

@MichielStock the taxa informations are stored as a Pair: name => id, so maybe the function can have a method that accepts this. I would see two of them, in fact:

taxon(t::Pair) = taxon(t.second)
function taxon(id::Int)
 # general case with only the ID
end

And I think that in your example query, name should be idinstead.

[MichielStock]

OK, seems to work, though the result of such a query does not have the keys status, confidence and matchType, which are required by GBIFTaxon(o::Dict{String, Any}).

I can either

• add default values for this
• make this optional for GBIFTaxon

[tpoisot]

@MichielStock can you open a pull request? I'll have a look at what the changes were, and can give better advice on status, etc.

By the way, please also add your name to the .zenodo.json file at the root of the project.