An Interface to the Reptile Database

Provides tools to retrieve and summarize taxonomic information and synonymy data for reptile species using data scraped from The Reptile Database website (< https://reptile-database.reptarium.cz/>). Outputs include clean and structured data frames useful for ecological, evolutionary, and conservation research.

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., 2026).

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 - 12,687 species) with their respective higher taxa information (updated to 01st of October, 2026);
A dataset with all unique synonyms for each current valid species (allSynonyms - 55,590 entries - updated to 01st of October, 2026);
Another synonyms dataset with all entries considering their respective references (allSynonymsRef114,251 entries - updated to 01st of October, 2026).

Next steps

[ ] Package webpage development

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