Dataset of seized wildlife and their intended uses

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2021.107531. This is version 3 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Supplementary Files
Authors

Oliver C. Stringham, Stephanie Moncayo, Eilish Thomas, Sarah Heinrich, Adam Toomes, Jacob Maher, Katherine G W Hill, Lewis Mitchell, Joshua V. Ross, Chris R. Shepherd

Abstract

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) threatens conservation and biosecurity efforts. The Internet has greatly facilitated the trade of wildlife, and researchers have increasingly examined the Internet to uncover illegal trade. However, most efforts to locate illegal trade on the Internet are targeted to one or few taxa or products. Large-scale efforts to find illegal wildlife on the Internet (e-commerce, social media, dark web) may be facilitated by a systematic compilation of illegally traded wildlife taxa and their uses. Here, we provide such a dataset. We used seizure records from three global wildlife trade databases to compile the identity of seized taxa along with their intended usage (i.e., use-type). Our dataset includes c. 4.9k distinct taxa representing c. 3.3k species and contains c. 11k taxa-use combinations from 110 unique use-types. Further, we acquired over 45k common names for seized taxa from over 100 languages. Our dataset can be used to conduct large-scale broad searches of the Internet to find illegally traded wildlife. Further, our dataset can be filtered for more targeted searches of specific taxa or derived products.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/uyqd3

Subjects

Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Keywords

CITES, dark web, illegal wildlife trade, LEMIS, social media, wildlife products, wildlife seizures

Dates

Published: 2021-07-07 04:47

Last Updated: 2021-07-11 16:45

Older Versions
License

CC-BY Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International