infinitylists: A Shiny application and R package for rapid generation of place-based species checklists

Area of Science:

• Biodiversity science
• Ecology
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Generating species checklists for specific taxa and geographic areas is crucial for biodiversity research.
• Large online biodiversity databases contain billions of occurrence records but can be challenging to process quickly due to dataset size.
• Existing tools often face limitations when handling massive biodiversity datasets.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce infinitylists, a Shiny application and R package designed for efficient species checklist generation.
• To provide a user-friendly tool for querying biodiversity data for specified taxa and spatial areas.
• To facilitate ecological fieldwork and natural history research.

Main Methods:

• infinitylists utilizes taxon-country datasets downloaded from biodiversity data providers.
• It employs an open-source, column-oriented data file format for rapid data retrieval and visualization.
• The application is available as a mobile-friendly web tool and an R package for local use.

Main Results:

• infinitylists enables users to generate species checklists for user-specified taxa and areas.
• The tool efficiently handles large biodiversity datasets, overcoming limitations of general-purpose software.
• It offers fast data retrieval and visualization capabilities.

Conclusions:

• infinitylists is a valuable and easy-to-use tool for ecologists and naturalists worldwide.
• Applications include supplementing existing survey data, planning field expeditions, and identifying biodiversity data gaps.
• It serves as a complementary resource to existing biodiversity databases.