Is there any API which can provide information on different animal species?

Question

I am working on a project (not a programming project) where we require a lot of information about different species such as average weight, lifespan, height, population numbers, endangered status etc.

I have been looking for an API to provide this information so that I don't have to manually search for it for over 100 species and I can't find anything that provides the information.

The best I have found so far is an API provided by the IUCN Red list, but this doesn't have all the information required (e.g. no lifespan data or weight)

Are there any APIs available which will provide this information?

Answer 1

Wikidata offers a powerful query interface for their knowledge graph.

For your specific question, there might be a predefined example that might get you started. This a predefined query which will create a list with the latin names of many species, linked to a page with data from the infoboxes and other data on Wikipedia.

Go to https://query.wikidata.org/

Klick On Examples. The button is at the top of the page.

In the pull-down menu, click on "Items with a Wikispecies sitelink" (it's #9 on the list)

Click on the Run Icon. (Its the |> icon on the Blue Background)

Of course you can adapt the query to your needs. Perhaps ask on Stackoverflow.com if you need help with the SPARQL query language or the Wikidata ontology.

For example, for Cheetahs there are quite a few attributes available such as birth weight, lifespan, ...

By the way, Google has an even larger knowledge graph with a search API that works similar to Wikidata's.