European Alien Species Information Network - Web Services
EASIN Web Services
The EASIN RESTful Web Services enable users and institutions to query and retrieve species information from our databases.
EASIN provides two groups of service methods, or endpoints: the Catalogue Web Service and the Geo Web Service;
Catalogue Web Service
This group of service methods is used to retrieve information from the EASIN Catalogue
in the form of JSON objects.
Users can retrieve records by species scientific name, their environment, impact, taxonomy, species of Union concern (LegalFramework) and more.
Catalogue Guidelines
The base URL for all the Catalogue methods call is https://alien.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apixg/catxg
A skip/take logic allows the retrieval of records in subsets, facilitating the process when large numbers of records result from a specific query.
The following criteria can be applied to retrieve species information from the EASIN Catalogue:
Species Name (or part of it)
Replace the {term} with the species scientific name you're looking for, or part of it. The minimum number of characters to start the search is four.
Environment
Replace {environment} with one of the these abbreviations: MAR or FRW or TER or EST to filter species by, marine, freshwater, terrestrial or oligohaline environments respectively.
Species of Union Concern
Species of Union Concern: retrieves all the species of Union Concern.
Species of Member State concern
Retrieves all the species which are of concern for at least the indicated Member State(s).
Replace the {countrycodes} placeholder with the desired country code.
To retrieve species of concern to more than one Member State, simply concatenate more than one country code by using commas, i.e. 'AT,BE,BG'.
Here is the list of accepted Country codes.
Species of Outermost regions concern
Retrieves all the species which are of concern for at least the indicated Outermost region(s).
Replace the {regioncodes} placeholder with the desired outermost region code.
To retrieve species of concern to more than one Outermost region, simply concatenate more than one region code by using commas, i.e. 'FR7,PT2,PT3'.
Here is the list of accepted Outermost regions codes.
Impact
Replace the {impact} placeholder with “hi” to select high impact species, or “lo” to select low or unknown species impact (everything but high impact species).
Taxonomy (single level)
Replace {taxa} with Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order or Family, and {taxa name} with the respective taxa names of interest.
Taxonomy (full)
Follows the same logic as for the single level taxonomy, by adding additional taxonomic levels and names to the search path.
Effective presence in countries
Species can be searched for specific countries of presence (species which are present 'at least' in the required countries).
Replace the {countrycodes} placeholder with the desired country code, or concatenate more country codes by commas, i.e. 'DK,EE,FI'.
Here is the list of possible Country codes.
Status
Replace the {status} placeholder with 'A', 'C' or 'Q' to search for Alien, Cryptogenic or Questionable species respectively.
Horizon Scanning
Use this criteria to search for species which are foreseen to be added to the EASIN Catalogue.
Partly Native species
Use this criteria to search for species which are native in at least one Member State.
Native range
Species can be searched for specific countries in which the species are native.
Replace the {countrycodes} placeholder with the desired country code, or concatenate more country codes by commas, i.e. 'DK,EE,FI'
Here is the list of possible Country codes.
Geospatial Web Service
This service method is used to retrieve species occurrences information from the EASIN Geo Database in the form of Well Known Text (WKT) geometries contained in JSON objects.
Users can retrieve geospatial information per single species by its EASIN ID.
To get EASIN species IDs, users can retrieve species by name through the EASIN Species Factsheets page,
or via the EASIN search and mapping tools (search for species and expand the species name in search results).
The base URL for all the geospatial web method calls is https://alien.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apixg/geoxg
A skip/take logic is used to obtain paginated results, improving the service performance and providing the users with a more usable output.
A layer type must be specified in the URL https://alien.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apixg/geoxg/speciesid/{speciesid}/layertype/{layertype}/skip/{skip}/take/{take} choosing between cntr for country level geometries and grid to get the geometries in the form of standard EEA 10x10Km grid.
Usage
Replace the {speciesid} placeholder with the species EASIN ID and the {layertype} placeholder with either 'cntr' or 'grid' to get occurrences at country level or grid level respectively.
Using JSON files
The resulting JSON is mainly intended to be used as a data transfer format, to enable machine-to-machine data transmission, or as a base format to download and transform to get a table representation of data.
There are several online tools available to users to convert or watch JSON files in commonly used formats, e.g. CSV, Excel, table format. For instance:
Case example
We want to retrieve information from the EASIN catalogue, regarding crayfish species whose name contains 'Procambarus'.
1. Use the link https://alien.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apixg/catxg/term/Procambarus; press enter.
2. If executed in the Firefox web browser, the above query returns an output similar to figure 1, where the three (0 to 2) found species data appear collapsed except the last one. The web service output might be displayed unformatted as in Figure 2 if using a browser/software not formatting the output.
3. To convert and read the JSON output, please paste or load the JSON in one of the following online tools, or the tools/software you prefer:
