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.
pip install pycites
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.
- 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