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Returns the accepted taxa a backbone places inside a genus or family, so a checklist can be built from the backbone as well as checked against it. The parent's rank is read from the backbone, as in downstream(), restricted to genus and family: children() is downstream() for a genus or family parent.

Usage

children(
  taxon,
  backbone = NULL,
  rank = "species",
  kingdom = NULL,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

taxon

A single genus or family name.

backbone

A single backbone name (e.g. "wfo") or a taxify_backend object. NULL (default) uses the highest-priority installed backbone.

rank

Rank of the children to return ("species" by default), or "any" (or NULL) for every rank below the parent. The parent itself is never returned.

kingdom

Optional kingdom (or kingdoms) the parent belongs to, as in taxify() ("plantae", "animals", ...). A genus or family name can be used in more than one kingdom (Morus is both mulberries and gannets); kingdom picks one. Without it such a result mixes the kingdoms, with a warning.

verbose

Logical. Default TRUE.

Value

A data.frame of accepted taxa, columns: name, authorship, rank, kingdom_group, family, genus, taxon_id, parent, parent_rank ("genus" or "family"), backbone. Empty if the parent is not found.

See also

downstream() to reach below a higher rank, synonyms(), taxify().

Examples

# Runs offline against the bundled example database.
old <- options(taxify.data_dir = taxify_example_data())

children("Quercus", backbone = "wfo")

options(old)