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Returns the set of authority codes that the package accepts when resolving species-name synonyms. Most are served by taxadb (a local database mirroring the providers documented in ?taxadb::td_create); "gnverifier" is the one HTTP-backed authority, calling the Global Names Architecture verifier service instead of a local database.

Usage

pr_valid_authorities()

Details

"col"

Catalogue of Life. The default and a sensible starting point for most taxa.

"itis"

Integrated Taxonomic Information System. Strong coverage for North American vertebrates and plants.

"gbif"

GBIF backbone. Wider coverage; captures more recent synonymy.

"ncbi"

NCBI Taxonomy. Best when you are working with sequence data.

"ott"

Open Tree of Life synthetic taxonomy. Useful when your downstream phylogeny is from the Open Tree synthesis. We restrict the schema to "dwc" (Darwin Core) when calling taxadb::td_create() because the "common" schema does not ship for OTT under taxadb v22.12.

"itis_test"

A small bundled subset of ITIS, cached locally with taxadb for testing. Intended for examples and unit tests; not for analysis.

"gnverifier"

Global Names verifier — HTTP-backed verification against ~100 authoritative sources (Catalogue of Life, ITIS, GBIF, NCBI, Open Tree, ...). No local database is downloaded; requires network access and the httr2 package. Useful when you want broader source coverage than any single taxadb provider, or want to avoid the ~100 MB taxadb download.

Five authority codes that previous versions of the package advertised — iucn, tpl, fb, slb, wd — are not on this list. Empirical testing against taxadb v22.12 showed that iucn errors with a schema mismatch and the other four are not taxadb providers at all. Anyone who was passing one of those values was getting a hard error; passing them now produces a helpful migration message instead.