Global Monitoring System - ECOSOLVE

Illicit online wildlife markets data from Brazil, South Africa and Thailand.

URL

https://www.ecosolve.eco/dashboard

Description

This tool allows us to explore a growing phenomenon in the world of wildlife trafficking: the use of social networks and online marketplaces to offer live animals or parts of them. To date, the tool has recorded nearly 13,000 online wildlife trade ads on various platforms, written in 29 different languages, across 10 data hubs.

Traffickers use social networks and online marketplaces such as Facebook Marketplace to sell or ask for live animals for sale or animal parts. The trade is sometimes connected with other illegal markets such as drugs trafficking. The screenshot above is from a video that you can find here.

The system allows filtering by 31 species, 16 countries plus unknown location (among the countries you can find Brazil, South Africa, Bangladesh, Colombia, India, Turkey, Thailand) and 40 different online marketplaces such as Instagram, Facebook, OLX and Mercado Livre (the last two refer to online marketplaces). When you perform a search you will get different visuals showing the number of detections, a market tracker and a trend monitor, all very useful to understand the market prevalence in certain online marketplaces.

Here, for example, I have searched for Pangolin in all countries + all platforms covered by the site.

The visuals are set to show me how many ads are available on the topic.

In addition, you will get a database that lists the website, name, species, type of product (live or parts), where it was sold, among other information. You can also download the whole database.

This is what the database looks like when searching for Pangolin.

Additionally, there is an analysis section where you can find different publications and events on online wildlife trade, environmental trade, among other relevant topics from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI TOC).

The ECOSOLVE initiative can be useful for those researching wildlife trade who want to explore online marketplaces and species trade ads. It can be a good place to start looking for patterns and discover the most relevant social networks and online marketplaces to search more thoroughly using other tools.

ECOSOLVE is not just a tool. Its team also leads various cooperation initiatives between local actors and law enforcement agencies to combat environmental crime.

Cost

• Free

• Partially Free

• Paid

Level of difficulty

Requirements

None.

Limitations

Not all species are available and the tool only shows results for 16 countries plus unknown location. March 23, 2025 was the last update and information is not updated automatically. Information in datasets is not very detailed. There is no information on whether this site is updated manually by a team or whether its updated using keywords appearing in the monitored social media and marketplaces, however, contributions can be made to the database, which would indicate that there may be human sources fact checking the information.

Ethical Considerations

None so far.

Guides and articles

ECO-SOLVE: Using AI to Disrupt Global Wildlife Trafficking

Tool provider

EU’s Global Illicit Flows programme (GIFP) and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI TOC), headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Advertising Trackers

• This tool has not been checked for advertising trackers yet.

• This tool uses tracking cookies. Use with caution.

• This tool does not appear to use tracking cookies.

Page maintainer
Bellingcat Volunteer Team