Download data from the African Elephant Database

The African Elephant Database (http://africanelephantdatabase.org/) is an online effort by the IUCN SSC African Elephant Specialist Group (AfESG) to gather data from different surveys and combine it with past African Elephant Status Reports (published by the same group).

The database is freely accessible online via a web user interface, and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, the AfESG did not have means to access the backend and retrieve raw data.

This script swifts through the online user interface and downloads all data contained in the “Elephant Estimates” columns as well as the spatial geometry of each stratum (the smallest area reported). It retains the hierarchy of spatial units by referencing to the higher-order units in attributes in order to allow the reconstruction of data on the level of input systems, countries, regions and the entire continent.

If you use python-africanelephantdatadownloader for scientific research, please cite it in your publication:
Fink, C. (2019): python-africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader: a Python utility to download the most up-to-date data from the African Elephant Database. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3243872

Dependencies

The script is written in Python 3 and depends on the Python modules BeautifulSoup4, GeoPandas, Shapely and requests.

To install all dependencies on a Debian-based system, run:

apt-get update -y &&
apt-get install -y python3-dev python3-pip python3-virtualenv \
    python3-bs4 python3-geopandas python3-requests python3-shapely

(There’s an Archlinux AUR package pulling in all dependencies, see further down)

Installation

• using pip or similar:

pip3 install -u africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader

• OR: manually:

  • Clone this repository

  git clone https://gitlab.com/helics-lab/python-africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader.git
  

  • Change to the cloned directory
  • Use the Python setuptools to install the package:

  cd python-africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader
  python3 ./setup.py install
  

• OR: (Arch Linux only) from AUR:

# e.g. using yaourt
yaourt python-africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader

Usage

Run aed-downloader [outputFile]. It will download all data (be patient) and save it in GeoPackage format to outputFile (default is output.gpkg in the current working directory).