python-africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader: a Python utility to download the most up-to-date 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.

This package is available from the PyPi software repository: https://pypi.org/project/africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader/
Its source code is hosted on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/helics-lab/python-africanelephantdatabasedatadownloader