taxadb: A high-performance local taxonomic database interface

A familiar and growing challenge in ecological and evolutionary research is that of establishing consistent taxonomy when combining data from separate sources. While this problem is already well understood and numerous naming authorities have been created to address the issue, most researchers lack a fast, consistent, and intuitive way to retrieve taxonomic names. We presenttaxadbRpackage which creates a local database, managed automatically from within R, to provide fast operations on millions of taxonomic names. taxadbprovides access to established naming authorities to resolve synonyms, taxonomic identifiers, and hierarchical classification in a consistent and intuitive data format. taxadbmakes operation on millions of taxonomic names fast and manageable.