The Encyclopedia of Life is a website that hosts information about life on Earth. Its mission is to increase awareness and understanding of living nature through a freely accessible digital source. Information is publicly available through graphical webpages (browser interface) or through an application programming interface (API). We developed Reol, an open‐source package for the R environment, which downloads data from the EOL API, searches for and extracts specific information, and builds tables with quantitative data and/or hierarchical classifications. We provide a detailed description how Reol can be used as a bridge between the R environment and the EOL API to extract quantitative or hierarchical content. It will be particularly useful for researchers who want information about taxonomic groups of interest (for example: how much information is known about flatworm species? What are the taxonomic synonyms for bird species?) or construct a taxonomic tree. Reol is a tool for researchers who wish to download and gather data from EOL or its provider pages. We provide numerous functions within R for downloading, gathering data in different forms, creating taxonomic trees, and plotting data, which work with functions already available through various packages. It joins a growing body of R packages that interact with web‐based APIs to streamline data acquisition, thereby easing the analysis of large publicly available datasets. Encyclopedia of Life is an online resource containing information about hundreds of thousands of species. We introduce an R package to access and assemble this information.