A spatial approach to combatting wildlife crime

Abstract

Poaching can have devastating impacts on animal and plant numbers, and in many countries has reached crisis levels, with illegal hunters employing increasingly sophisticated techniques. We used data from an 8-year study in Savé Valley Conservancy, Zimbabwe, to show how geographic profiling-a mathematical technique originally developed in criminology and recently applied to animal foraging and epidemiology-can be adapted for use in investigations of wildlife crime. The data set contained information on over 10,000 incidents of illegal hunting and the deaths of 6,454 wild animals. We used a subset of data for which the illegal hunters' identities were known. Our model identified the illegal hunters' home villages based on the spatial locations of the hunting incidences (e.g., snares). Identification of the villages was improved by manipulating the probability surface inside the conservancy to reflect the fact that although the illegal hunters mostly live outside the conservancy, the majority of hunting occurs inside the conservancy (in criminology terms, commuter crime). These results combined with rigorous simulations showed for the first time how geographic profiling can be combined with GIS data and applied to situations with more complex spatial patterns, for example, where landscape heterogeneity means some parts of the study area are less likely to be used (e.g., aquatic areas for terrestrial animals) or where landscape permeability differs (e.g., forest bats tend not to fly over open areas). More broadly, these results show how geographic profiling can be used to target antipoaching interventions more effectively and more efficiently and to develop management strategies and conservation plans in a range of conservation scenarios.

A Scoping Review of Serial Homicide Geographic Mobility Literature and Four Typologies

“…While both GSA and JTC share similarities, they are two distinct geographic mobility concepts. For example, GSA consists of gathering, displaying, and manipulating geographic coordinates, imagery, satellite photography, and other geographic points on maps to organize and visualize spatial data (Faulkner et al, 2018; Lammers & Bernasco, 2013; Rossmo, 2000; Snook et al, 2005). Geospatial analysis of crime allows researchers to map the locations or crime points to see geographic and temporal patterns, as well as, trends related to the location of crimes (Ackerman & Rossmo, 2015; Neldner, 2015).…”

Exotic Hobos: Release, escape, and potential secondary dispersal of African red-headed agamas (Agama picticaudaPETERS, 1877) through the Florida railway systems

“…That said, the models will work more accurately for species with small home ranges, and sessile species such as plants and fungi. In conclusion, geographic profiling is an invaluable technique which can be applied over a wide range of ecological investigations in order to locate potential points of origin and persons of interest (Faulkner et al 2015;Faulkner et al 2017;Faulkner et al 2018;Romanach et al 2019;Verity et al 2014). These models can be used by both ecologists and law enforcement agencies to generate a list of potential suspects to investigate, and create risk-management guidelines to effectively combat the spread of established invasive species and predict potential high-risk areas for the prevention of future introductions.…”

“…Geographic profiling is a technique which is used most often in forensic criminology to model the spatial locations of crimes and identify the origin location or "anchor point" from which a criminal is operating (Rossmo 1999;Rossmo et al 2014). Since its original use, geographic profiling has been modified and applied to infectious disease models (Verity et al 2014), ecology (Faulkner et al 2015;Faulkner et al 2017), wildlife criminology (Faulkner et al 2018;Romanach et al 2019), and biological invasions (Faulkner et al 2017;Papini et al 2013;Stevenson et al 2012), where locations of committed crimes are instead substituted with sites of infection, suspected poaching locations, and animal observations records. The geographic profiling algorithm uses coordinate locations of points of interest (e.g.…”

Understanding the origins of the ring‐necked parakeet in the UK

“…victim encounter sites, vehicle dump sites, body dump sites) to generate a probability surface that is then overlaid on a map of the area of interest to produce a geoprofile (Rossmo, 2000). More recently, the model has been adapted to fit a Bayesian framework (Verity et al, 2014;Faulkner et al, 2016) and applied to biological data, from such fields as epidemiology (Le Comber et al, 2011;Verity et al, 2014), animal diseases (Smith et al, 2015), conservation biology (Faulkner et al, 2018;Struebig et al, 2018), ecology (Faulkner et al, 2015) and invasion biology (Stevenson et al, 2012;Faulkner et al, 2016).…”