Thomas Mesaglio , Fonti Kar, Hervé Sauquet, Will Cornwell

Premise: Online biodiversity databases like GBIF hold billions of occurrence records, including vouchered specimens and citizen science records. Integrating these two data streams facilitates more robust species checklists. However, processing huge biodiversity datasets can be time-consuming, and most databases are species-focused, rather than place-based, visualisation tools. Methods and Results: infinitylists is a Shiny application and R package that allows users to generate regional species checklists. Our implementation of ‘lazy loading’ using Apache parquet for data storage allows rapid loading of records. After selecting an area, records are retrieved from the Atlas of Living Australia or GBIF. Queries return a text summary, map, table and CSV file. Conclusions: infinitylists is an easy-to-use tool with applications including supplementing survey data, planning collecting expeditions, and informing gap-filling exercises. infinitylists is a complementary tool to existing databases to allow users to rapidly answer the question ‘which species of taxon X have been documented in (or near) spatial polygon Y?’.