CITES Trade Database
Around 23 million records of trade in wildlife since 1975.
URL
Description
The tool hosts around 23 million records of wild fauna and flora trade records. You can look by year ranges, exporting and importing countries, source, purpose, trade terms (live individuals, skins, etc.) and taxon (genus, species, etc).
You can configurate the kind of results you will get. You can get a csv report with customized configurations or a web version.
For example, if you are looking for China imports of wild species for biomedical purposes from 2018 to 2023, you will get a detailed table with over 100 results that gives you species info, importer and exporter info, reported quantity, purpose, source, among other findings.
The tool allows you to bulk download the whole database. With a relatively fast internet connection (145.9 Mbps download and 9.92 Mbps upload when I tried) you can get it in under 2 minutes. It is divided into csv archives.
The tool also links to the CITES Wildlife TradeView, a interactive online tool for exploring and visualising CITES trade data. You can explore visuals provided in a global view (data of all CITES-listed species), country view (data for one or more countries) and taxon view (data for one or more species or taxonomic groups).
I reviewed the 2025.1 version.
Cost
In exceptional and complex cases, and upon request, the CITES Secretariat or UNODC may have to recover staff costs.
Level of difficulty
Requirements
No need to log in or create accounts to use this tool.
If you need to cite the information, use this format:
Statistics derived from the CITES Trade Database:
CITES Trade Database [year]. Compiled by UNEP-WCMC for the CITES Secretariat. Available at: trade.cites.org. Accessed [insert date downloaded].
The full database should be cited as:
Full CITES Trade Database Download. Version [year.x]. Compiled by UNEP-WCMC, Cambridge, UK for the CITES Secretariat, Geneva, Switzerland. Available at: trade.cites.org.
Limitations
There are some studies that expose some tool limitations, including from the CITES Secretariat.
At a CITES meeting it was noted that with the current functions of the platform it is not possible to analyze trade patterns including, for example, whether a specimen was found in one large shipment or in multiple small shipments or whether the specimen was shipped together with other specimens. A study on the limitations of CITES described, among other results, that 96% of the records are not complete, and that three-quarters of the data do not have the quantities of importers or exporters. Among some of the important results of another study it was found that more than one-third of the species had a different category of traded volume and that the number of shipments did not reflect traded volume in 15% of vertebrate species.
Ethical Considerations
None so far.
Guides and articles
Guide:
A guide to using the CITES Trade Database
Projects:
What do CITES data tell us about the legal wildcat trade?
An Assessment of Wildlife Trade in Central Asia by TRAFFIC
Tool provider
The UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), based in the United Kingdom, on behalf of the CITES Secretariat, located at Geneva, Switzerland.
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Lieth Carrillo
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