helminthR: an R interface to the London Natural History Museum's Host-Parasite Database

The understanding of the diversity and distribution of helminth parasites is currently constrained by the limited number of host-parasite interaction databases, and the difficulty in accessing existing data. The London Natural History Museum's Host-Parasite Database represents one such underutilized database, containing over a quarter million helminth parasite occurrence records, accessible through a web interface. To enable users to programmatically search and manipulate data from this database, I developed an R package called helminthR. Here, I introduce the core functions of the package, and detail how helminthR can be used to obtain host-parasite interaction records, citations for interactions, and host taxonomic data.