Changes in version 2.0.6 (2026-05-11)                  

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.

                 Changes in version 2.0.5 (2025-12-01)                  

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.