Abstract:

Aims: The Catalogue of Life provides the basis for understanding both regional and global biodiversity. With the invention and development of the internet, the up-to-date species checklists stored in the public databases has greatly promoted the development of taxonomy, conservation biology, and macroecology. Public species checklists play an indispensable role in biodiversity conservation and aid in the assessment of species’ conversation status. The Species 2000 China Node (http://www.sp2000.org.cn) and the Catalogue of Life (http://www.catalogueoflife.org) are among the leading online databases in cataloguing biodiversity, contain 122,280 and 1,829,672 taxa respectively (including infraspecific taxa). Although searching the content of the websites may be relatively straightforward, downloading the data and transferring it into a statistical environment for further analysis can present challenges.
Method: To address this issue, we developed the package SP2000 using the R programming language.
Application: SP2000 is an open-source, cross-platform, and user-friendly package which aims to help users query and download the checklist of organisms (including animals, plants, fungi, and microbes) from within and outside China. Here we introduce and describe the usage of SP2000 including installation, and configuration of parameters.

Key words: species checklist, redlist, China’s biodiversity, R package