Wildlife Trade Portal

An open-source tool to search wildlife seizure data worldwide.

URL

www.wildlifetradeportal.org

Description

This tool helps researchers explore and visualize wildlife trade seizures around the world by filtering by individual incidents or events. You can search by species, countries involved and dates. An advanced search allows you to include incidents involving organized crime and corruption, people, specific locations and taxonomic characteristics of species. As a result you will get charts and visuals that enable you to explore incidents by country, year, taxonomy, commodity type, category (for example, seizure or enforcement action), transport method, trade routes and transit type (airport, road, etc).

You will also see a results page with a list of the incident, a map that locates incidents in the countries involved, and other charts that you can reproduce and modify depending on what you need.

For example, you can see the number of people by government involvement over time or the number of incidents by type of transit over time. You can also search for multiple species. In this way, you can find incidents related to all the species you are looking for.

The results can be exported. Have a look at this user guide (pdf) to get a sense of how the dashboard looks like.

You can contribute to this site by providing the source, the date, the country of an incident, any associated countries on the trade route, any associated species, the type of commodity, and the quantity of commodity of a seizure of which you are aware.

The Wildlife Trade Portal is also connected to another tool called TimberStats. This site, launched on November 2024, allows you to explore timber trade data from the UN Comtrade database via API. It offers an Annual Trade Statistics Dashboard, where you can explore trade flows around the world, and an Annual Trade Discrepancies Dashboard, where you can find inconsistencies in reported trade between two countries.

To date, this tool continues to receive frequent updates.

Free
Partially Free
Paid

Level of difficulty

Requirements

Access is immediate, but you have to “request an account”. You have to provide your workplace and personal information, plus some details of your work or you put “Freelance” in the workplace section and a brief explanation of what you are working on. A confirmation email will be sent and after clicking on it, you are all set.

Limitations

This site uses media sources and contributions, also aproximates (date ranges, for example). This site may be a good place to start researching, but you may have trouble checking how official the data is. It is advisable to search for original sources from the results provided on this site. All information is obtained from open sources and there is no information about the fact checking process.

Ethical Considerations

This site uses media sources such as local news (for example, this seizure in India) and NGO's articles (for example, this seizure in Uganda), as well as contributions. The ethical challenges this raises must be determined by each user, taking into account for what and by whom the data will be used.