rgbif:name_backbone() requests coming up blank when genus is available on GBIF

[flyingratchet]

rgbif:name_backbone() requests coming up blank when genus is available on GBIF

[jhnwllr]

I don't know for sure what is happening with the other 10% of the names that do not match to the GBIF backbone, but for the example you give, it what I call the "too many choices problem". There exists more than one entry in the backbone with that name. Using authorship usually fixes the problem.

https://docs.ropensci.org/rgbif/articles/taxonomic_names.html#too-many-choices-problem

Using the author results in a match.

rgbif::name_backbone("Acrotylus Fieber, 1853")

If you do not know the authorship, you might need to use rgbif::name_backbone("Acrotylus",verbose=TRUE), which will return more choices for you to manually review.

[flyingratchet]

Oh thank you!! I That makes sense. I was very puzzled by that. Coincidentally, I was trying to glean the author names themselves from gbif—so the "verbose=TRUE" seems like the way to go in instances of ambiguity.