Taxon ranks

taxonRank is a required Darwin Core term for checklists. When not present in the source data, retrieving it from a list of scientific names can be tedious.

GBIF name parser

Luckily, the GBIF name parser you used for checking scientific names can be used to retrieve taxon rank information as well, at least for ranks of species or below. It is provided in the column rankmarker. For example:

rgbif::parsenames(c(
    "Leucosolenia botryoides", 
    "Leucosolenia botryoides var. variabilis (Haeckel, 1870)", 
    "Synchaeta lakowitziana", 
    "Synchaeta lakowitziana subsp. arctica De Smet, 1930")) %>%
  select(rankmarker)

Will return:

rankmarker
sp.
var.
sp.
subsp.

Where sp. stands for species, var. for variety and subsp. for subspecies. You can map this information to the Taxonomic Rank GBIF Vocabulary using the recode() function (see Tidyverse functions). Taxon ranks of names above the species rank will need to be added on a one-by-one or conditional basis, e.g. a case_when() function.