Authors:
- Andrés Ospina-Alvarez [*]
- Silvia de Juan; Pablo Pita
- Gillian B. Ainsworth
- Fábio L. Matos
- Cristina Pita
- Sebastián Villasante
- Corresponding Author: Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies IMEDEA (UIB-CSIC), C/ Miquel Marques 21, CP 07190 Esporles, Balearic Islands, Spain.
We provide, for the first time, a comprehensive description of the legal trade in cephalopods to understand who the key world players in the cephalopod seafood markets are. We analysed 20 years of records compiled by the United Nations COMTRADE database. The database contained 115,108 entries for squid and cuttlefish and 71,659 entries for octopus, including the product flow between traders (countries or territories) weighted by volume (kg) and monetary value (USD). Network theoretic analysis was used to explore the emergent properties of this database through the analysis of different measures of centrality that provide insights on the key role of the traders in the network. This is a fully operational shinny app. Shiny is an R package that makes it easy to build interactive web applications (apps) straight from R. All the code necessary to analyse and chart the Cephalopods Global Trade Network (CGTN) can be found here. It can be downloaded and run on an RStudio local installation. In addition, to further facilitate exploration and viewing by users from outside the academy or with basic technical knowledge, we have launched a fully operational web application at https://aospina.shinyapps.io/CGTN_app/.