Digital Surveillance: A Novel Approach to Monitoring the Illegal Wildlife Trade

Abstract

A dearth of information obscures the true scale of the global illegal trade in wildlife. Herein, we introduce an automated web crawling surveillance system developed to monitor reports on illegally traded wildlife. A resource for enforcement officials as well as the general public, the freely available website, http://www.healthmap.org/wildlifetrade, provides a customizable visualization of worldwide reports on interceptions of illegally traded wildlife and wildlife products. From August 1, 2010 to July 31, 2011, publicly available English language illegal wildlife trade reports from official and unofficial sources were collected and categorized by location and species involved. During this interval, 858 illegal wildlife trade reports were collected from 89 countries. Countries with the highest number of reports included India (n = 146, 15.6%), the United States (n = 143, 15.3%), South Africa (n = 75, 8.0%), China (n = 41, 4.4%), and Vietnam (n = 37, 4.0%). Species reported as traded or poached included elephants (n = 107, 12.5%), rhinoceros (n = 103, 12.0%), tigers (n = 68, 7.9%), leopards (n = 54, 6.3%), and pangolins (n = 45, 5.2%). The use of unofficial data sources, such as online news sites and social networks, to collect information on international wildlife trade augments traditional approaches drawing on official reporting and presents a novel source of intelligence with which to monitor and collect news in support of enforcement against this threat to wildlife conservation worldwide.

Quantitative methods of identifying the key nodes in the illegal wildlife trade network

“…Thus, understanding the cultural and economic backdrop within these countries could improve our ability to devise better interventions. In addition, HealthMap data will have missing data due to variability in media coverage, media censorship, and the language of the curated reports (22). However, HealthMap has tried to minimize bias through a systematic approach to collecting data, as well as sourcing data in other languages like Japanese.…”

“…As no comprehensive data on the volume, frequency, composition, and routes of the illegal wildlife trade are publicly available, we relied on the formal and informal reports in global digital media as described by Sonricker Hansen et al (22) to summarize the network and composition of the illegal wildlife trade. These reports are contained in the HealthMap Wildlife Trade database (www.healthmap.org/wildlifetrade/).…”

“…Unofficial sources include free and publicly available websites, discussion forums, mailing lists, news media outlets, and blogs. The database uses a text-mining algorithm based on keyword search strings, which uses news indexers that draw from more than 50,000 possible English and Japanese Web-based sources (22).…”

“…We focused on the period between August 1, 2010 and December 31, 2013 and limited the scope of our wildlife trade analysis to elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers, which are the most frequently cited animals in the database (22). From each report of a trade interception of an elephant, rhinoceros, and tiger listed in the wildlife trade database, we extracted the type of product(s) traded, country of origin of the product, and the actual or intended country of destination of the product.…”

Monitoring internet trade to inform species conservation actions

“…The use of the internet in the illegal wildlife trade has been an area of concern, with studies implying that the internet is a common venue for conducting illegal transactions (Williamson 2004, IFAW 2005, 2008, Wu 2007, Sonricker Hansen et al 2012, Chng 2014. In contrast, there have been few published studies of internet-traded plants.…”