Flora Europaea

[sckott]

http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/FE/fe.html

Seems that the previous maintainer has passed

idea from @Alectoria

[sckott]

@Alectoria two questions:

• what kind of data is available in this database? we only are interested in taxonomic data. If there's other data (e.g., life history data), we could leave that out
• is there any chance of getting a dump of the database? Looks like we can scrape data from the page because queries are encoded in the URL (e.g., http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/cgi-bin/nph-readbtree.pl/feout?FAMILY_XREF=&GENUS_XREF=Helianthus&SPECIES_XREF=&TAXON_NAME_XREF=&RANK= ) but that's not ideal

[Alectoria]

Thanks @sckott. It's a taxonomic database that includes vascular plant names at different levels (family, genus etc), status (name accepted or not), geographic distribution and alien/native status.

I have e-mailed data managers in the past and it seems there is no data dump.

[sckott]

@Alectoria Okay, we scrape then. I'll ping you here when there's something to test - not guaranteeing that this will be feasible, but I'll try

[Alectoria]

@sckott Thanks!

[Alectoria]

@sckott I have recently scraped the url content of Flora Europaea for one of my projects and used regular expression to extract some data (distribution, native/-non-native status). Interested in the code? I would be happy to share.

[eduardszoecs]

Cool @Alectoria!
Can you write up a function and create a pull-request?
Otherwise, just share your code with us and we will implement it into taxize (of course acknowledging you as developer!).

[sckott]

👍

[Alectoria]

@sckott @Edild OK - I will create a pull request. Will try to extract all data.

[sckott]

thanks @Alectoria

[eduardszoecs]

Great @Alectoria !

[Alectoria]

@Edild @sckott I've refined my function to scrape the Flora Europaea database and would be ready to integrate it into taxize. However, I wonder whether we might bump into legal issues since it is copyrighted:

http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/FE/disclaimer.html

[sckott]

closing due to inactivity