wildlifetradenetworks / pycites

A Python package to download and interact with the CITES trade database

pycites

pycites is a package to download and interact with the CITES Trade Database using Python. citesdb exists for R users to load and analzyes this data, so we wanted a way to do the same!

Currently very much a work in progress. Currently only downloads and loads data.

Installation

pip install pycites

Usage instructions

To download the CITES Trade Database and load into a dataframe, run the following in a Jupyter notebook or Python shell:

import pycites

pycites.get_data()
df = pycites.load_data()

This will download and extract the zip file from the CITES website, do some basic data validation (e.g. drop rows with missing or incorrect Years), and combine the data into a single compressed CSV file. This uses a decent amount of memory, so may cause issues on a machines with low resource.

Roadmap

• Release a CSV to make it easier for users to download and load data
• Experiement with other data formats for better memory usage of data (currently pretty high)
• Add a CLI for downloading data
• Include metadata and other useful information, like citesdb
• Add additional functionality for analysis (time series and network analyses), and integrate with other data sources (such as World Bank)
• Setup CI and testing