Public data sources.

Open-access databases, repositories, and resources for comparative and evolutionary biology. The ones we return to, grouped by what you're trying to pull.

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

• GBIFGlobal Biodiversity Information Facility; 2+ billion species occurrence records; R package rgbif
• iNaturalistCommunity-contributed observations with photos and locations; API available
• ITISIntegrated Taxonomic Information System; authoritative taxonomic names for North American species
• NCBI TaxonomyTaxonomic backbone for all NCBI databases; downloadable flat files
• Catalogue of LifeGlobal species checklist with ~2 million accepted species names
• WikispeciesFree species directory; open-edit taxon pages with literature links
• World Flora OnlineAuthoritative plant names and classification

• Open Tree of LifeSynthetic supertree of all life; API via the rotl R package
• TimeTreeDatabase of published divergence time estimates; search any pair of taxa
• TreeBASERepository of published phylogenetic matrices and trees; searchable by taxon or publication
• VertLifePosterior distributions of fully-sampled vertebrate phylogenies for birds, mammals, amphibians, squamates

• NCBI GenBank / SRAPrimary archive for sequence data, raw reads, and genomes
• EnsemblAnnotated vertebrate genomes with comparative genomics tools
• UCSC Genome BrowserGenome assembly browser with annotation tracks
• NCBI GenomeGenome assemblies and annotation for thousands of species
• FlyBaseDrosophila genomics and genetics (community resource)
• WormBaseC. elegans and related nematode genomics

• DryadData underlying published papers; CC0 license; DOI-minted datasets
• ZenodoCERN-hosted open repository for any research output; R packages, datasets, code
• FigshareFigures, datasets, code, and preprints; unlimited public storage
• OSF (Open Science Framework)Project management plus data/code sharing platform widely used in ecology/evolution

• rotlR interface to Open Tree of Life API
• rgbifAccess GBIF occurrence data from R
• taxizeTaxonomic name resolution across multiple databases from R
• ape / phytoolsRead and manipulate phylogenies
• rfishbaseAccess FishBase from R
• rentrezNCBI Entrez API from R