refloraR: An R package for efficiently retrieving and analyzing plant specimen data from the Herbário Virtual Reflora
Carlos Calderón del Cid, Ana Flávia Alves Versiane, Paula Leitman, Fabiana Ranzato Filardi, Rafaela Campostrini Forzza, Domingos Cardoso · 2026
Read refloraR: An R package for efficiently retrieving and analyzing plant specimen data from the Herbário Virtual Reflora by Carlos Calderón del Cid, Ana Flávia Alves Versiane, Paula Leitman, Fabiana Ranzato Filardi, Rafaela Campostrini Forzza, Domingos Cardoso (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13583462.txt.
Description
Carlos Calderón del Cid and co-authors introduce refloraR in a 2026 software paper for plant science. Brazil's Herbário Virtual Reflora holds millions of high-resolution specimen images from dozens of herbaria, but pulling that data into an analysis takes work.
The R package connects to the herbarium's publishing toolkit to download, parse, summarize, and filter records. It returns data in Darwin Core Archive form or as dataframes, and it can fetch records at any level of the plant family tree. A worked example counts specimens that lack a firm identification, using them to flag gaps in plant taxonomy across collections.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Carlos Calderón del Cid, Ana Flávia Alves Versiane, Paula Leitman, Fabiana Ranzato Filardi, Rafaela Campostrini Forzza, Domingos Cardoso |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 34 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |