Ackbar Joolia - Traffic in endangered species: visualizing the CITES database

CITES Trade DatabaseConvention on International Trade for Endangered Species of Wild Flora and

Faunaover 11 million trade records...and increasing

over 50 000 scientific namesmore than 700 000 trade records annually

Ackbar Joolia - UNEP-WCMC

Wildlife trade: second most lucrative after drugs

think elephant ivoryleather products / furagar-woodopportunity for raising awareness

huge amount of data...

‘untaped wealth of resource’uniqueover 25k downloads per year plus direct requests

What can be done with the data?

lots of thingstrendsintelligent searchesinteractive, instant, comparative visualisationsgeneric/flexible approach

How can the data be organised?

geographically : country levelspecies level : all sharks -> blue sharksdifferent categorisation levels

trade in hunting trophies

all wild species

What have we got now?

very basic searchnot a good interface

flat results / downloadvery recently, launched the CITES Dashboards

CITES Dashboards

Challenges

working with data as islots of dataaggregation possibilitiesneed to provide a ‘better’ servicerobust efficient performant framework

potential areas of work

Search facility

simple / advanced sets of queryexporting/importing countries

species

terms / purpose / source

‘intelligent’ ways of searchingflexible approach

Visualisation

certainly the most attractive partpotentially ‘endless’ possibilities hereany ideas from anyone?everyone loves nice flowing summarised informationinstant view of trendsidentify emerging trends on an ‘automated’ basis

Comparative ‘graphs’ trends

top most something...drilling featuresmaps to show trade patterns, or more...selective graphschange over time

Robust efficient distributed architecture

current structure not a good platform/architecture to work offplatform that would work as efficiently in ‘real-time’dashboard built on a subsetany ideas? Is it a viable solution?Hadoop / HBase ?Bigtables ?

Integration / Interaction with other datasets / projects

impact of climate change?in conjunction with RedList data?Poverty index?

Sensitivity

wildlife trade is a business for certain countriese.g. watch straps from Switzerland > 100k/yearsole earning for certain families

Sensitivity

There is confidential informationNot to create tensions among countries, or ‘finger-pointing’Should be a tool / set of ideas to outline useful constructive information about tradeneed to encourage parties to report

Other projects...

we maintain the species database for CITES and EUworking very closely with SCITES to encourage electronic permittingmore and more countries adhering

‘Real-time’ v/s Real-time data

electronic permitting huge step to get trade information as soon as issuedEPIX project which aims at extracting data from countriespower of Trade query tool with real-time data

What are my expectations?

Hope the subject and unique dataset is of interestwe could make a big impact with efficient visualisation toolbut 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?

Thank you

We have brought a subset of the Trade data to work on for those interestedA good prototype would very easily find its way onto a proper product