Trait & Phenotype Databases

• AVONET comprehensive morphological, ecological, and life-history data for all ~11,000 bird species
• PanTHERIA life-history, ecology, and geography for all known extant mammals; also available via the PanTHERIA R package
• TRY Plant Trait Database global database of plant traits across 2,500+ species; access requires registration
• AnAge: Animal Ageing and Longevity Database longevity and life-history traits for 4,000+ animal species
• AmphiBIO ecological trait data for 6,776 amphibian species

Occurrence & Taxonomy

• GBIF Global Biodiversity Information Facility; 2+ billion species occurrence records; R package rgbif
• iNaturalist community-contributed observations with photos and locations; API available
• ITIS Integrated Taxonomic Information System; authoritative taxonomic names for North American species
• NCBI Taxonomy taxonomic backbone for all NCBI databases; downloadable flat files
• Catalogue of Life global species checklist with ~2 million accepted species names
• Wikispecies free species directory; open-edit taxon pages with literature links
• World Flora Online authoritative plant names and classification

Phylogenies & Divergence Times

• Open Tree of Life synthetic supertree of all life; API via the rotl R package
• TimeTree database of published divergence time estimates; search any pair of taxa
• TreeBASE repository of published phylogenetic matrices and trees; searchable by taxon or publication
• VertLife posterior distributions of fully-sampled vertebrate phylogenies for birds, mammals, amphibians, squamates

Genomics & Sequence Data

• NCBI GenBank / SRA primary archive for sequence data, raw reads, and genomes
• Ensembl annotated vertebrate genomes with comparative genomics tools
• UCSC Genome Browser genome assembly browser with annotation tracks
• NCBI Genome genome assemblies and annotation for thousands of species
• FlyBase Drosophila genomics and genetics (community resource)
• WormBase C. elegans and related nematode genomics

Repositories & Data Archives

• Dryad data underlying published papers; CC0 license; DOI-minted datasets
• Zenodo CERN-hosted open repository for any research output; R packages, datasets, code
• Figshare figures, datasets, code, and preprints; unlimited public storage
• OSF (Open Science Framework) project management + data/code sharing platform widely used in ecology/evolution

R Packages for Data Access

• rotl R interface to Open Tree of Life API
• rgbif access GBIF occurrence data from R
• taxize taxonomic name resolution across multiple databases from R
• ape / phytools read and manipulate phylogenies
• rfishbase access FishBase from R
• rentrez NCBI Entrez API from R