The taxonomic backbone for everything in the vault. Provides AphiaID as the universal join key, plus synonym handling, authority strings, and ~hundred trait fields per taxon.
Access
- REST API:
https://www.marinespecies.org/rest/ — per-taxon lookups. - Bulk DwC-A: monthly archive at marinespecies.org/download/, ~500 MB.
Why we use it
OBIS already exposes WoRMS-resolved AphiaIDs in acceptedNameUsageID, so joining is free. WoRMS gives us:
- Vernacular names per language
- Accepted vs. synonym status
- Higher taxonomy (kingdom → genus) for species not richly populated in OBIS
- Marine/brackish/freshwater environment flag (used to filter freshwater
outliers from queries)