Cactus Trade Data: The CITES Record for Cacti Since 1976

What the database records

The database holds what CITES Parties declare in their annual reports: one row per shipment line, with the taxon, the term traded, a quantity and unit, the source and purpose codes, and the exporting and importing countries. We took the full download with no filters, as the publisher issues it, and kept the rows whose family is Cactaceae.

Reported, not measured

Every figure is what a Party reported. Parties remain responsible for the accuracy of their reports, and the CITES Secretariat does not guarantee it. A quantity here is a declaration, not a count made at a border.

Exporter and importer figures

Most shipments appear twice, once in the exporting country’s report and once in the importing country’s. Adding the two double counts the trade, so every chart, table and download on this page keeps them in separate columns and none offers a total. The last finding above shows how far apart the two sides can be.

Units and terms

Quantities are summed only within one term and one unit. A blank unit and Number of specimens both mean a count, as the CITES guide recommends, which makes live plants, counted, the headline measure. Seeds by weight and seeds by count never share a total.

A few records carry terms that cannot describe a cactus, such as raw corals or small leather products. They stay as reported, and the explorer lists them under Rare terms.

Source codes and the 1991 gap

Source codes were not part of the reporting guidelines for most records before 1991. Earlier trade mostly shows as not reported, so wild and propagated shares on this page start in 1991 and the explorer shades the years before it.

What source code I means

Code I marks confiscated or seized specimens that were later traded under a permit. It records legal trade in once-confiscated material, not a count of seizures, which is why the explorer labels the layer Confiscated. Documented seizure cases are logged separately, in the seizure tracker above the explorer.

Recent years and what is missing

Annual reports arrive late, so the latest years can look like a fall in trade until the missing reports come in. The explorer hides the two incomplete years by default and hatches them when you include them.

Domestic trade, illegal trade and trade in species outside the Convention never reach CITES annual reports, so none of them is here.

Names

Genus names follow the source data. Where a reported genus is a synonym that the World Checklist of Vascular Plants maps to exactly one accepted genus, we re-map it; ambiguous names stay as reported, and every re-map is listed in the genus mapping log in the downloads. Family-level records such as Cactaceae spp. and hybrid labels are kept as reported. None of the genera named in the findings is affected by the mapping.

The species table adds the accepted WCVP name beside each reported name. Where the two differ only in spelling or a missing rank, as with Ariocarpus agavoides for the accepted Ariocarpus agavioides, the accepted name is shown; this matching never moves a record to another genus.

Known quirks

One importer-reported record of wild plants from 2021 dominates the importer-side wild total and is flagged in the first finding. Some records of the four whole-genus Appendix I cacti still carry Appendix II in the appendix field after 1992, and some of their trade sits under older names such as Neolloydia.

How we built it

At rarecactus.com we sell only seed grown plants, which is why this page keeps one distinction sharp: CITES source code A counts every artificially propagated plant, grafts and cuttings included, so it measures nursery supply rather than seed grown stock.