WRiMS webservices

The World Register of Introduced Marine Species (WRiMS) records which marine species in the World Register of Marine species (WoRMS) have been introduced deliberately or accidentally by human activities to geographic areas outside their native range.

As a user or developer you can use the WoRMS webservice to feed your own application with standard WoRMS data, including WRiMS data.

A non-exhaustive list of applications:

- get the AphiaID for your taxon

- check the spelling of your taxa

- get the authority for your taxa

- get the full classification for your taxa

- resolve your unaccepted names to accepted ones

- get all synonyms for a taxon

- fuzzy/near match your species list

- resolve a common name/vernacular to a scientific name

- get the common name(s)/vernacular(s) for a taxon

- get the sources/references for a taxon

- get the WoRMS citation for a taxon

- get the direct children for a taxon

- get all taxa modified during a time interval

- get an external identifier for a taxon

- get the AphiaID for an external identifier/database

- get all distributions for a taxon

- get all attributes for a taxon

Date ( Creation): 2016-02-17

Date ( Revision): 2021-10-19

Date ( Publication): 2019

Status: On going / operational

Point of contact

Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) - LifeWatch.be - Flanders Marine Institute

Keywords: marine species

Keywords: register

Keywords: synonymy

Keywords: introduced species

Keywords: alien species

Keywords: taxonomy

Access constraints: Intellectual property rights

Use limitation: The text on the WRiMS pages is open-access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). This License permits unrestricted use, provided it is cited as requested on the WoRMS webpages, unless stated otherwise on the individual pages. Images are by default open-access under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA license, unless stated otherwise. Re-distribution of the entire database is not permitted, unless by prior written agreement. This is mainly to avoid circulation of (quickly) outdated copies of WoRMS, accessible through different pathways, which can lead to confusion for our many users.

OnLine resource: Link to the service (
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
)

OnLine resource: DOI (
DOI
)

Operation name: Aphia platform

Web site: http://www.marinespecies.org/about.php#what_is_aphia

Description: The Aphia platform is an infrastructure designed to capture taxonomic and related data and information, and includes an online editing environment. It is the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and all its related global, regional and thematic species databases, but it also allows the storage of non-marine data. The Aphia platform is an MS SQL database, containing over 400 fields spread over more than 80 related tables. Content-wise, the Aphia structure can roughly be divided into 10 modules: taxonomy, distribution, traits, specimen information, vernacular names, notes, links, images, identification keys and sources.

Function: Aphia uses unique and stable identifiers for each available name in the database, through Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs). The system allows the storage of accepted and unaccepted names and it documents the relationship between names. This makes it a very powerful tool for taxonomic quality control, and also allows the linking of different pieces of information through scientific names, within the Aphia platform and in relation to externally-hosted databases.

Topic Category: Species distribution

Service Category: data analysis

Service Category: data processing

Service Language: eng

Service TRL: TRL 9 – Actual system proven in operational environment

Service Funding: The maintenance and further development of WRiMS relies on financial contributions, the time contributed by its editorial board, and support of its host institution: VLIZ. WoRMS is currently funded through the LifeWatch Belgium project.