World Bank Global Shipping Traffic Density

Use in your agent

List World Bank shipping-density zip download links into pandas. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 5, 2026.

Access

• No account or key. Zip downloads are listed on the public dataset page.
• Credit World Bank / IMF World Seaborne Trade Monitoring System per CC BY 4.0 when you use the data.

Request

curl -sL 'https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037580/Global-Shipping-Traffic-Density'

Format

Dataset landing-page HTML containing direct .zip links for the six raster layers (Commercial, Fishing, Oil & Gas, Passenger, Leisure, Global); download a layer and read it with rasterio.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""World Bank Global Shipping Traffic Density: list the six layer zip links into pandas -> Parquet. No key; CC BY 4.0."""
import re
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037580/Global-Shipping-Traffic-Density"
r = requests.get(URL, timeout=60)
r.raise_for_status()
links = sorted(set(re.findall(r'href="([^"]+\.zip)"', r.text)))
df = pd.DataFrame({"zip_url": links})
df.to_parquet("wb_shipping_density_zip_links.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "zip links found")

Run by us on 2026-11-05 (python 3 | pandas | pyarrow | requests). Result: 6 zip links found on 2026-11-05 (Commercial, Fishing, Oil & Gas, Passenger, Leisure, Global layers).

Limits

• Static dataset (last updated May 3, 2021); no live updates.
• The Global layer zip alone is 510.1 MB; download only the layer(s) you need.

Quirks

• The zip links point to datacatalogfiles.worldbank.org, a separate host from the dataset page.
• Layer filenames mix case (e.g. ShipDensity_Leisure.zip vs shipdensity_global.zip).

Terms and attribution

• Dataset page states "License : Creative Commons Attribution 4.0".
• Dataset page states "Classification : Public".

Sources

• https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037580/Global-Shipping-Traffic-Density: “License : Creative Commons Attribution 4.0”
• https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037580/Global-Shipping-Traffic-Density: “This data was obtained through a partnership with IMF, as part of IMF's World Seaborne Trade Monitoring System (Cerdeiro, Komaromi, Liu and Saeed, 2020).”