DOI: 10.14466/cefasdatahub.189
title: UK Marine Ornamental Trade: Species-Level Import Records on Corals, Invertebrates, and Fish in 2018 and 2019

description: The dataset provides species-level information, as declared by the exporter, for marine ornamental species that were imported into the UK during select periods in 2018 and 2019. The study was undertaken to support the provision of higher resolution data on the UK’s marine ornamental trade at a Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES) technical workshop on the conservation and management of marine ornamental fish (Decision 18.296). The dataset provides a snapshot in space and time of the UK's marine ornamental import trade and should be interpreted as such. A sample of hard copy sales invoices from import manifests were collected from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) at Heathrow airport Border Inspection Post. The sample comprised of marine invoices from the second week of each month, from March 2018 to November 2019. Records were manually digitized into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Along with species, digitizers recorded the number of individuals, the value (unit and total cost), the aquatic environment declared on the invoice (marine, freshwater or both), and whether the organisms were declared to be wild caught or captive bred, as detailed in the sales invoice. Only marine species are provided in this dataset, and all commercially sensitive information has been redacted. It should be noted that during the data collation period, the UK was still part of the European Union and imports were handled using the Trade and Control Expert System (TRACES).

Once all sales invoices containing marine species from the sample had been digitised, data were cleaned to standardise records. First, we used the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS Editorial Board, 2024), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to correct species names, and acquire taxonomic information (Family, Order and Class). We used the worrms (Chamberlain and Vanhoorne, 2023), rgbif (Chamberlain et al., 2024) and taxize (Chamberlain et al. 2020) packages to interface with the respective databases. In cases where only common names were recorded, or where incorrect names were not detected as synonyms by WoRMS, we manually identified the taxa. We also used WoRMS to identify the environment in which the species lives: marine, freshwater or brackish and those assigned to freshwater and brackish were excluded from further analyses.

Next, we used IUCN and CITES listings to ascertain the conservation status of the species in the record. IUCN listings were acquired using the rredlist package (Gearty and Chamberlain, 2022), which interfaces with the IUCN Red List API. We acquired CITES listings using the rcites package (Geschke et al. 2023), which interfaces with the Species+ database.

Where source (wild caught or cultivated) was declared, records were labelled as “Declared wild” or “Declared farmed”. Where no declaration was made in the shipment documentation, records were labelled as NA. Finally, we converted all currencies to USD.