Tab and comma delimited versions of Discover Life bee species guide and world checklist (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila)

Introduction

This archive includes a tab-delimited (tsv) and comma-delimited (csv) version of the Discover Life bee species guide and world checklist (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila). Discover Life is an important resource for bee species names and this update is from Draft-57, February 2024. Data were accessed and transformed into a tsv file in May 2026 using Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) nomer software. GloBI now incorporates the Discover Life bee species guide and world checklist in its functionality for searching for bee interactions.

Update

This version now includes subgenera names and column header have been included.

Alternate Dataset

A tab-delimited version of the Discover Life taxonomy as derived from Dorey et. al, 2023 can be found via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10463762. This version of the Discover Life world species guide and checklist includes subgeneric names also.

Citation

Please cite the original source for this data as:

Ascher, J. S. and J. Pickering. 2024.
Discover Life bee species guide and world checklist (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila).
http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?guide=Apoidea_species Draft-57, 27 February, 2024

nomer

nomer is a command-line application for working with taxonomic resources offline. nomer incorporates many of the present taxonomic catalogs (e.g., catalog of life, ITIS, EOL, NCBI) and provides simple tools for comparing between resources or resolving taxonomic names based on one or more taxonomic name catalogs. Discover Life is in nomer version 0.5.1 and this full dataset can be recreated by installing nomer from https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/nomer and running

nomer list --include-header discoverlife > discoverlife.tsv

using Nomer v0.6.4 . 

Data Columns

Discover Life provides a world name checklist and includes other names (synonyms and homonyms) that refer to the same species. In the tsv file, the provided name is both the accepted, or checklist name, or "other name." All names will be listed as a providedName. Below is an example subset of the transformed version of the data.

• providedExternalId= link to name on Discover Life
• providedName=an accepted or "other name" in the Discover Life bee checklist. "Other names" can be synonyms or homonyms.
• providedAuthorship=authorship for the providedName
• providedRank=rank of the providedName
• providedPath=higher taxonomy of the providedName. This will be the same as the accepted name or resolvedName
• relationName=relationship between the "other name" and the bee name in the Discover Life checklist. It may include itself
• resolvedExternalID=an accepted name in the Discover Life bee checklist
• resolvedExternalId=link to name on Discover Life
• resolvedAuthorship=authorship of the accepted, or checklist name
• resolvedRank=rank of the accepted, or checklist name
• resolvedPath=higher taxonomy of the accepted, or checklist name

Changes

No major changes to format in this version.

References

Jorrit Poelen, & José Augusto Salim. (2026). globalbioticinteractions/nomer: (0.6.4). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19925540

Poelen JH, Simons JD and Mungall CH. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2014.08.005.

Seltmann KC, Allen J, Brown BV, Carper A, Engel MS, Franz N, Gilbert E, Grinter C, Gonzalez VH, Horsley P, Lee S, Maier C, Miko I, Morris P, Oboyski P, Pierce NE, Poelen J, Scott VL, Smith M, Talamas EJ, Tsutsui ND, Tucker E (2021) Announcing Big-Bee: An initiative to promote understanding of bees through image and trait digitization. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 5: e74037. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.5.74037

Dorey, J.B., Fischer, E.E., Chesshire, P.R. et al. A globally synthesised and flagged bee occurrence dataset and cleaning workflow. Sci Data 10, 747 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02626-w