Wildlife crime moves in spatial pulses

Meredith L Gore, Alexander Perigon, Hannah Murray, Bienvenu Takem Mbi, Anne Stephanie Kobla, Carla Louise Mousset Moumbolou, Stéphanie Bourgeois, Matthew H Shirley, Bistra Dilkina

The geography of crime is often treated as a static backdrop to criminal activity, yet where crime occurs may change as a crime unfolds. We show that wildlife crime has a dynamic geography that expands, contracts, and becomes anchored in persistent places. Combining crime scripting with participatory mapping, we examined pangolin hunting and scale trade across Cameroon and Gabon and found that both forms of wildlife crime moved in spatial pulses rather than progressing steadily through a linear supply chain. Hunting was highly spatially elastic, expanding and contracting markedly across crime stages, whereas trade was comparatively spatially anchored. Despite these differences, persistent hot spots for hunting and trade converged geographically, with persistent hunting hotspots largely nested within persistent trade hotspots. The geography of illicit supply chains is therefore shaped not only by movement between places but also by spatial inertia and stage-specific changes in the spatial footprint of activity. Spatializing crime scripts reveals that geography is not a fixed backdrop to illicit activity but a dimension that changes as crime unfolds, and provides a framework for understanding wildlife crime as a dynamic spatial process.