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 - 12,500 species) with their respective higher taxa information (updated to 15th of September, 2025);
A dataset with all unique synonyms for each current valid species (allSynonyms - 53,159 entries - updated to 23th of May, 2025);
Another synonyms dataset with all entries considering their respective references (allSynonymsRef110,413 entries - updated to 23rd of May, 2025).

Next steps

Stable version 1.0.1 CRAN submission (August 18th, 2025)
Stable version 1.0.1 CRAN release (August 22nd, 2025)
Paper submission (August 18th, 2025)
Paper publication (October 20th, 2025)
update allReptiles
update allSynonyms
Package webpage development
API development and package API compatibility

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 (joaopaulo.valencar@gmail.com)

Orcid | Research Gate

Ph.D in Ecology at USP

Post-Doc at: Laboratório de Evolução e Diversidade I - “LED 1” - Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas, Universidade Federal do ABC, São Bernardo do Campo, SP – Brazil

letsRept🦎 🐍 🐊 🐢