Email from ACLED. Check to see if this applies to our code and fix if it does
Good afternoon,
ACLED is announcing two new parameters for the ‘acled’ API endpoint:
‘with_total’ parameter: Previously the ‘count’ value (the number of rows returned in the current page) and the ‘total_count’ value (the total number of rows matching the query, ignoring any limit or page parameter) were included by default in the response data. As part of a hotfix, those values are now excluded by default in order to increase response speed. Both values can still be displayed by including the parameter ‘with_total=true’. Our apologies for any inconvenience this caused as we were unable to provide advance warning.
‘maritime_pairs’: ACLED has now reclassified maritime locations in the dataset, meaning events that occur in international waters will appear with the name of that body of water (e.g. Atlantic Ocean) in the ‘country’ field rather than be attributed to the nearest country. For example, events that occurred in the Red Sea were previously coded to ‘Yemen’ as the country. Now, they are coded to ‘Red Sea’ as the ‘country’.
Incidents occurring within territorial waters of a country (12 nautical miles off the coast) will be coded to the country rather than the body of water. For example, an event occurring 1 nautical mile off the coast of Yemen will have ‘Yemen’ coded as the country.
On export, users have the option to pair these bodies of water to existing countries that share its coastline. ACLED established these pairings based on physical geography, specifically focusing on which countries border a body of water or are most closely linked to that maritime zone.
This method allows for more intuitive data exports: when a user selects a country and opts to include maritime data (maritime_pairs=true), the response will include events from the specific seas or straits associated with that nation. For example, the parameters ‘country=Yemen&maritime_pairs=true’ will return all events in Yemen and all events in the Red Sea.
By default, the maritime_pairs parameter is set to ‘false’, meaning an export of Yemen events will only include events occurring in Yemen and not in international waters nearby. If downloading the entire dataset, no change is needed, as these maritime locations will be exported alongside all other events by default.
Details about both of these updates can be found in the ACLED API guide and this information page. For any questions, please reach out to access@acleddata.com.
Best wishes,
The ACLED Data Team
Email from ACLED. Check to see if this applies to our code and fix if it does