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rcites: An R package to access the CITES Speciesplus database - Open Access
The conservation of biodiversity is a complex problem strongly tight to political actions. CITES is a multilateral environmental agreement that was established in 1975 and aims to monitor and regulate the trade of endangered species so that their trade does not threaten the survival of the species in the wild. In 2013, the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the CITES Secretariat created Speciesplus, a comprehensive database of not only CITES listed species and their regulation status within CITES but also the species’ status within the EU legislation and the species’ status within the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. Speciesplus is publicly available at https://speciesplus.net. With rcites we provide an R client to the Speciesplus/CITES Checklist API, giving access to the Speciesplus database. The ability to query the database will improve the efficiency and reproducibility of biodiversity conservation analysis workflows.
Geschke et al., (2018). rcites: An R package to access the CITES Speciesplus database. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(31), 1091, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01091
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