As CITES has released a more complete, larger, shipment-level database, we've moved development to the citesdb package, which uses a better out-of-memory framework for larger data.

Authors: Noam Ross

The cites package provides a complete extract of the CITES wildlife trade database.

Install the cites package with this command:

source("https://install-github.me/ecohealthalliance/cites")

The main function in cites is cites_data(). This returns the main CITES database as a dplyr tibble.

cites makes use of datastorr to manage data download. The first time you run cites_data() the package will download the most recent version of the database (~32MB). Subsequent calls will load the database from storage on your computer.

The CITES database is stored as an efficiently compressed .fst file, and loading it loads it a a remote dplyr source. This means that it does not load fully into memory on load, but some limited operations (column selection) can be performed on-disk. If you wish to manipulate it as a data frame, simply call dplyr::collect() to load it fully into memory, like so:

all_cites <- cites_data() %>% 
  collect()

Note that the full database will be approximately 270 MB in memory.

cites_codes() returns a data frame with descriptions of the codes in the various columns of cites_data(). This is useful for lookup or joining with the main data for more descriptive outputs. The ?cites_code help file also has a searchable table of these codes. cites_metadata() provides field descriptions and cites_parties() lists the CITES party countries and the date they joined the treaty.

See the developer README for more on the data-cleaning process.

Please give us feedback or ask questions by filing issues

cites is developed at EcoHealth Alliance. Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.