The intended use of this archive/cache is to allow for offline access to existing species interaction datasets. The program "Elton" (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.998263) was used to populate the content of elton-datasets.tar.gz . The same program can be used to extract information from the cache archive also. To install, extract elton-datasets.tar.gz into a directory of choice using: tar xfz elton-dataset.tar.gz To use, download elton.jar from this publication and execute the following to get a list of available datasets: java -jar elton.jar ls on a system that has java v8+ installed. use: java- jar elton.jar usage or visit https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/elton for more available commands. Alternatively, without using Elton, you can access the data by inspecting the access.tsv files in the various directories of the datasets directory. When using these datasets in a publication or product, please cite the *original* data providers and publications. You can find the citations in the data.