algaeClassify 2.0.6

Bug fixes and refactoring

• Rewrote genus_search_itis(), species_search_itis(), and itis_search_df() to query the ITIS JSON web service (www.itis.gov/ITISWebService/jsonservice/) directly, replacing all ritis:: function calls. The ritis and RCurl packages are no longer required and have been removed from Imports.
• Added internal helper itis_json_get() (not exported) that wraps curl::curl_fetch_memory() with an explicit timeout, charset-aware response decoding (handles Latin-1 author names in ITIS responses), and a package-level persistent curl handle (.itis_pool) that reuses the TCP/TLS connection to www.itis.gov across sequential requests.
• Fixed higher-taxonomy and synonym lookups when the matched name is a synonym or orthographic variant. Both genus_search_itis() and species_search_itis() now retrieve acceptedTsn from ITIS and use it for hierarchy and synonym lookups. Previously, synonym TSNs had no parent in the ITIS hierarchy, so these lookups returned NA even when the accepted name was correctly resolved (e.g. "Aphanizomenon flosaquae" → "Aphanizomenon flos-aquae", genus "Cyanarcus" → "Gomontiella").
• Fixed hyphen handling in species_search_itis(): hyphens in species epithets are now preserved (e.g. "Aphanizomenon flos-aquae" resolves correctly instead of returning matched.name=NA).
• Added comprehensive tryCatch error handling to all ITIS API calls in genus_search_itis() and species_search_itis(): any connectivity or parse failure returns a graceful NA-padded result with a warning rather than crashing.
• Wrapped \examples{} for genus_search_itis(), species_search_itis(), and itis_search_df() in \donttest{}. These examples require a live ITIS network connection; elapsed time depends on server response, not package code.

algaeClassify 2.0.5

Major changes

• Version 2.0.x includes tools for querying the algaebase taxonomic database with a valid API key.
• Version 1.4.x includes alternative tools for standardizing taxonomic names and extracting higher taxonomy using the Geographic Names Resolution Service and the ITIS taxonomic database.

Minor changes

-Version 2.0.1 has been approved as an official U.S. Geological Survey software release. -Version 2.0.2 includes improved error handling for itis search functions, and will return a warning and data.frame containing NAs if the ITIS website is temporarily down. -Version 2.0.3 queries the Global Names Resolver via its API, rather than calling functions from the taxize package. -Version 2.0.4 contains revised functions for querying the Global Names Resolver based on its updated API. -Version 2.0.5 contains bug fixes for the gnr_simple() and gnr_df() search functions.