United States wildlife and wildlife product imports from 2000-2014

Abstract

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.

Fig. 1

LEMIS wildlife trade data trends from 2000 through 2014. We summarized the number of unique shipments (a) and number of live organisms (b) imported per month, defining shipments as synonymous with the LEMIS data field ‘control_number’. Each shipment may contain multiple types of wildlife products and thus can be recorded over multiple rows in the data. Note that the spikes in live organism imports in 2001 and 2002 are driven by extremely large recorded shipments (>5 million individuals) of tropical fish and crustaceans (Penaeus sp.).