2. CITES Trade Database
Convention on International Trade for Endangered Species of Wild Flora and
Fauna
over 11 million trade records...and increasing
over 50 000 scientific names
more than 700 000 trade records annually
Ackbar Joolia - UNEP-WCMC

3. Wildlife trade: second most
lucrative after drugs
think elephant ivory
leather products / fur
agar-wood
opportunity for raising awareness

4. huge amount of data...
‘untaped wealth of resource’
unique
over 25k downloads per year plus
direct requests

5. What can be done with the
data?
lots of things
trends
intelligent searches
interactive, instant, comparative
visualisations
generic/flexible approach

6. How can the data be
organised?
geographically : country level
species level : all sharks -> blue sharks
different categorisation levels
trade in hunting trophies
all wild species

7. What have we got now?
very basic search
not a good interface
flat results / download
very recently, launched the CITES
Dashboards

8. CITES Dashboards

9. Challenges
working with data as is
lots of data
aggregation possibilities
need to provide a ‘better’ service
robust efficient performant framework

10. potential areas of work

11. Search facility
simple / advanced sets of query
exporting/importing countries
species
terms / purpose / source
‘intelligent’ ways of searching
flexible approach

12. Visualisation
certainly the most attractive part
potentially ‘endless’ possibilities here
any ideas from anyone?
everyone loves nice flowing summarised
information
instant view of trends
identify emerging trends on an
‘automated’ basis

13. Comparative ‘graphs’ trends
top most something...
drilling features
maps to show trade patterns, or more...
selective graphs
change over time

14. Robust efficient distributed
architecture
current structure not a good platform/
architecture to work off
platform that would work as efficiently
in ‘real-time’
dashboard built on a subset
any ideas? Is it a viable solution?
Hadoop / HBase ?Bigtables ?

15. Integration / Interaction with
other datasets / projects
impact of climate change?
in conjunction with RedList data?
Poverty index?

16. Sensitivity
wildlife trade is a business for certain
countries
e.g. watch straps from Switzerland >
100k/year
sole earning for certain families

17. Sensitivity
There is confidential information
Not to create tensions among countries,
or ‘finger-pointing’
Should be a tool / set of ideas to outline
useful constructive information about
trade
need to encourage parties to report

18. Other projects...
we maintain the species database for
CITES and EU
working very closely with SCITES to
encourage electronic permitting
more and more countries adhering

19. ‘Real-time’ v/s Real-time data
electronic permitting huge step to get
trade information as soon as issued
EPIX project which aims at extracting
data from countries
power of Trade query tool with real-
time data

20. What are my expectations?
Hope the subject and unique dataset is of
interest
we could make a big impact with efficient
visualisation tool
but also, what about a distributed
architecture? How to process huge data in
efficient/fast manner?
Are there any other ideas for best utilisation
of the data?

21. Thank you
We have brought a subset of the
Trade data to work on for those
interested
A good prototype would very easily
find its way onto a proper product