inst/ro_blog_post.md

In ropensci/citesdb: A High-Performance Database of Shipment-Level 'CITES' Trade Data

slug: "citesdb" title: " package_version: 0.1.0 authors: - Noam Ross - Evan A. Eskew date: 2019-06-01 categories: blog topicid: tags: - Software Peer Review - R - community - software - packages - citesdb - wildlife - databases

topics

At EHA, we work with wildlife trade data to help understand risks to wildlife and their potential as vectors for infectious disease. Critical in controlling, monitoring, and understanding this trade is the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, a treaty and organization that regulates and monitors the international wildlife trade.

Recently, CITES, together with WCMC, began publishing their data at a new level of detail - individual shipment-level records of trade going back 40 years.

Importance of context and metadata for analyzing data.

I've been an editor for rOpenSci for five years, but this is the first time I put a package of my own through the process!

citesdb was also an an opportunity to put into practice some ideas for data package design. The CITES trade database falls into a common category of "biggish" data - larger than RAM for many users, but still small enough to analyze on a single machine.

Thanks to reviewers and editors.

ropensci/citesdb documentation built on May 13, 2023, 1:53 a.m.