I downloaded the taxonomy info via rgbif, which doesn’t include information on the reason for the DOUBTFUL status. But I notice on the taxon pages linked above that (some?) of this info is available: genera with no species, or taxa with no occurrences.
Is it possible to access this info via the API? It would be useful to have that available when screening DOUBTFUL taxa to determine whether I should drop them, include them, or need to review them further.
The information displayed on doubtful taxa comes from this generic FAQ: https://www.gbif.org/faq?question=what-does-the-taxon-status-doubtful-mean-and-when-is-used. I don’t think we have the specific reasons for any given taxon. Perhaps the FAQ should still be made available when accessing data via rgbif. @jwaller what do you think?
i.e. - the “issues” reported in the lower left, and the “no occurrences” reported in the lower right.
But maybe that information isn’t actually stored in the backbone, just generated by querying the database each time the page is served?
The number of occurrences associated with a given taxon is a separate call to the occurrence API, it isn’t actually stored in the backbone.
The issues associated with a taxon record aren’t available in the output of the Species Match function but should be when checking specifically for a the record. See this example: https://api.gbif.org/v1/species/4769105
As it turns out, there were only 29 records in my DOUBTFUL taxa, compared to 180K in the ACCEPTED taxa. So for my current project dropping the small number of DOUBTFUL is fine. But I’ll look into querying the species records directly like you suggest for next time.
