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.

• 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