IUCN-Data-Scraping

Repository created to aid a research project of Maastricht Science Project to create a brochure highlighting wildlife and their levels of endangerment based on the IUCN

Information

The IUCN data Scraping aimed to retrieve select information from a set of IUCN links to a specific animal in order to extract the following information: Scientific name, criteria, Country, justification, assessors.

Note: There does exist an IUCN API requiring registration which unfortunately takes some time to go through. Please use the API and plan ahead with time to spare for the registration process before running the this data scraping process. The API will provide a far more efficient and easier approach to accessing data. This scraping process should be used as a second resort.

Project Structure

The project is arranged as follows:

errors/
    # Contains IUCN links where scraping errors occured
links/
    # Contains the original list of IUCN links for scraping
results/
    # Contains the scraped information for each set of links
main.py  # Execution of the data scraping process
envrionment.yml  # Conda virtual environment
position.csv  # Simple position update when scraping

Environment

The environment.yml file contains all required dependencies for the project. In order to construct the Conda virtual environment, please run the following steps:

1. Create the Environment

conda env create -f environment.yml

2. Activate the Environment

conda activate IUCN-data

3. Specify Environment in your IDE

If you are using VScode or PyCharm, please select the created environment as the environment to use. Here is the link for how to accomplish this on PyCharm: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/conda-support-creating-conda-virtual-environment.html

How to Use

1. Create a csv file containing IUCN links

Place this file inside the links/ directory. Example links are as follows (please also review the links directory for further examples):

https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-1.RLTS.T179055548A179055550.en
https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-1.RLTS.T179056157A179056160.en
https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-1.RLTS.T179086396A179086399.en

Please specify the links file name on line 25 in the main.py file as in the below example:

links_file = "links/no_justification_links.csv"

2. Set Position to Zero

Within the position.csv file, please set the number to 0. This allows a new position to be held for the file to read in. For each new file you read please reset this to zero. If you need to stop and restart the program at any point, the position ensures you do not have to repeat any previous scrapes.

3. Specify the Results File

Please specify the name of your results csv file on line 26 as in the example below:

results_file = "results/data_no_justification.txt"

If no file is yet found, the code will create the file. If the file already exists, new information will be appended to it.

4. Specify the Errors File

The errors file contains the links at which data scraping was not successful. The links are saved for potential manual scraping. Please specify the name of the errors csv file on line 27 as in the below example:

errors_file = "errors/errors_no_justification.txt"

If no file is yet found, the code will create the file. If the file already exists, new information will be appended to it.

5. Execute the Program.

For each link the extracted information will be printed to the console such that you know the scraping process is running.