An Interface to the Reptile Database.
letsRept🦎 🐍 🐊 🐢
An Interface to the Reptile Database
This package was developed to facilitate the processes of reptile nomenclature update based on the Reptile Database website (Uetz et al., 2025).
Currently, the package access many species information from the Reptile Database using R interface.
I hope it to be useful, to people trying to match databases from different sources (IUCN, species traits database, etc), or trying to get summaries from a given higher taxa or region (e.g.: Snakes from Brazil). But it can also just print single species information directly in R.
Any feedback, suggestion or request are welcome!
Download
To install the development version run:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("joao-svalencar/letsRept", ref="main")
library(letsRept)
To access the full list of functions with clear examples, browse the package vignettes:
browseVignettes("letsRept")
Internal datasets
The package counts with a full list of current valid species (
allReptiles- 12,650 species) with their respective higher taxa information (updated to 22nd of June, 2026);A dataset with all unique synonyms for each current valid species (
allSynonyms- 55,130 entries - updated to 27th of March, 2026);Another synonyms dataset with all entries considering their respective references (
allSynonymsRef113,377 entries - updated to 22nd of June, 2026).
Next steps
- [ ] Package webpage development
News on GitHub Version (not in CRAN yet)
Function reptSplitCheck() now accepts a vector of pubDates. In this way each species in the querry can be checked against an specific date.
How to Cite
To cite this package in publications, run:
citation("letsRept")
⚠️ Important note:
letsRept retrieves valuable taxonomic and synonymy data directly from the Reptile Database. When citing this package, please also cite the original database as a data source.
References
Uetz, P., Freed, P, Aguilar, R., Reyes, F., Kudera, J. & Hošek, J. (eds.) (2025). The Reptile Database. http://www.reptile-database.org
Vieira-Alencar, J.P.S., Liedtke, H.C., Meire, S., Roll, U., Uetz, P. & Nori, J. (2025). letsRept: An R package to access the Global Reptile Database and facilitate taxonomic harmonization. Biodiversity Informatics, 19, 120-143. https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v19i.24329
Author:
Vieira-Alencar, João Paulo dos Santos ([email protected])