Arctic Tracker / What changed / Finding
Finding: incommensurable trade quantities
Status: corrected in the rebuild. The defect is not displayable through the arctic_api view layer.
What was wrong
The published figure ranked species by a single "Total Quantity Traded" computed as SUM(quantity) over a column whose unit varies row by row. Kilograms were added to individual animals. All fifteen species in that figure had a total that mixed mass with counts. The resulting ranking was an artifact of which unit yields larger integers, not a ranking of trade volume.
Separately, 226,046 of 492,095 CITES trade records (45.9%) sit inside a shipment coordinate reported from both the importer and the exporter. A total that spans both reporter sides counts those shipments twice.
What the rebuild does
Trade is reported per unit dimension (mass, count, volume, length), per traded term, and per reporter side. There is no function in the application data layer that returns a dimensionless quantity total. That is enforced by the view definitions and by tests, not by convention alone.
Arithmetic check
| Claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| CITES trade records in the deposit | 492,095 | tables/cites_trade_records.csv |
| Records in dual-reported shipment coordinates | 226,046 | derived at analysis time from the same source |
| Share dual-reported | 45.9% | 226,046 ÷ 492,095 |
| Species in the published figure whose total mixed units | 15 of 15 | each of the fifteen top-SUM(quantity) species carries both a mass and a count dimension |
Related
- Application:
/changes#no-total-quantity - Code:
src/lib/figures.ts,src/lib/queries.ts(getSpeciesTrade)
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