Data from: United States wildlife and wildlife product imports from 2000–2014
The global wildlife trade network is a massive system that has been shown to threaten biodiversity, introduce non-native species and pathogens, and cause chronic animal welfare concerns. Despite its scale and impact, comprehensive characterization of the global wildlife trade is hampered by data that are limited in their temporal or taxonomic scope and detail. To help fill this gap, we present data on 15 years of the importation of wildlife and their derived products into the United States (2000–2014), originally collected by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. We curated and cleaned the data and added taxonomic information to improve data usability. These data include >2 million wildlife or wildlife product shipments, representing >60 biological classes and >3.2 billion live organisms. Further, the majority of species in the dataset are not currently reported on by CITES parties. These data will be broadly useful to both scientists and policymakers seeking to better understand the volume, sources, biological composition, and potential risks of the global wildlife trade.
Resources in this dataset:
Resource Title: United States LEMIS wildlife trade data curated by EcoHealth Alliance (Version 1.1.0) - Zenodo.
File Name: Web Page, url: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3565869
Over 5.5 million USFWS LEMIS wildlife or wildlife product records spanning 15 years and 28 data fields. These records were derived from >2 million unique shipments processed by USFWS during the time period and represent >3.2 billion live organisms. We provide the final cleaned data as a single comma-separated value file. Original raw data as provided by the USFWS are also available. Although relatively large (~1 gigabyte), the cleaned data file can be imported into a software environment of choice for data analysis. Alternatively, the assocated R package provides access to a release of the same cleaned dataset but with a data download and manipulation framework that is designed to work well with this large dataset. Both the Zenodo data repository and the R package contain a metadata file describing each of the data fields as well as a lookup table to retrieve full values for the abbreviated codes used throughout the dataset.
Contents: lemis_2000_2014_cleaned.csv: This file represents the compiled, cleaned LEMIS data from 2000-2014. This data is identical to the version 1.1.0 dataset available through the lemis R package.
lemis_codes.csv: Full values for all coded values used in the LEMIS data. Identical to the output from the lemis R package function "lemis_codes()".
lemis_metadata.csv: Data fields and field descriptions for all variables in the LEMIS data. Identical to the output from the lemis R package function "lemis_metadata()".
raw_data.zip: This archive contains all of the raw LEMIS data files that are processed and cleaned with the code contained in the 'data-raw' subdirectory of the lemis R package repository.
Resource Software Recommended: R package,url: https://github.com/ecohealthalliance/lemis
Funding
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Science Foundation: SES-HSD-AOC “Human-Related Factors Affecting Emerging Infectious Diseases”
National Science Foundation: BCS-0826840
National Science Foundation: BCS-0826779
National Institutes of Health
USDA
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council: NSF DEB 1414374, BBSRC BB/M008894/1, “US-UK Collab
United States Agency for International Development: Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project
History
Data contact name
Eskew, Evan A.Data contact email
eskew@ecohealthalliance.orgPublisher
Scientific DataIntended use
These data will be broadly useful to both scientists and policymakers seeking to better understand the volume, sources, biological composition, and potential risks of the global wildlife trade.Use limitations
Although records understood to be erroneous near-duplicates were removed in the dataset (as described in the Methods), end users should note that exact duplicate records remain.Temporal Extent Start Date
2000-01-01Temporal Extent End Date
2014-12-31Theme
- Not specified
ISO Topic Category
- biota
- environment
- society
- transportation
National Agricultural Library Thesaurus terms
United States; wildlife; imports; biodiversity; introduced species; pathogens; animal welfare; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; cleaning; data collection; Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; scientists; risk; metadata; ecosystems; monitoring; databases; wildlife management; zoonoses; humans; law enforcement; information systems; exports; computer software; researchers; species identification; invertebrates; plants (botany); microorganisms; information processing; quality control; meat products; information storage; automation; tropical fish; Penaeus; taxonomy; international trade; natural resource policyPending citation
- No
Public Access Level
- Public