ORCID Profile
0000-0002-4224-7090
Current Organisation
University of Adelaide
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Publisher: California Digital Library (CDL)
Date: 27-08-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 08-03-2021
DOI: 10.1111/COBI.13675
Abstract: The unrivaled growth in e‐commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume and frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach that lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and collecting data. We produced an accessible guide for internet‐based wildlife trade surveillance. We detailed a repeatable method involving a systematic internet search, with search engines, to locate relevant websites and content. For data collection, we highlight web‐scraping technology as an efficient way to collect data in an automated fashion at regularly timed intervals. Our guide is applicable to the multitude of trade‐based contexts because researchers can tailor search keywords for specific taxa or derived products and locations of interest. We provide information for working with the ersity of websites used in wildlife trade. For ex le, to locate relevant content on social media (e.g., posts or groups), each social media platform should be examined in idually via the site's internal search engine. A key advantage of using the internet to study wildlife trade is the relative ease of access to an increasing amount of trade‐related data. However, not all wildlife trade occurs online and it may occur on unobservable sections of the internet.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2021
Publisher: California Digital Library (CDL)
Date: 28-05-2020
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-08-2018
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-10-2022
DOI: 10.1111/COBI.13978
Abstract: The international wildlife trade presents severe conservation and environmental security risks, yet no international regulatory framework exists to monitor the trade of species not listed in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). We explored the composition and dynamics of internationally regulated versus nonregulated trade, with a focus on importations of wild‐caught terrestrial vertebrates entering the United States from 2009 to 2018. We used 10 years of species‐level trade records of the numbers of live, wild‐caught animals imported to the United States and data on International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates of extinction risk to determine whether there were differences in the ersity, abundance, and risk to extinction among imports of CITES‐listed versus unlisted species. We found 3.6 times the number of unlisted species in U.S. imports compared with CITES‐listed species (1366 vs. 378 species). The CITES‐listed species were more likely to face reported conservation threats relative to unlisted species (71.7% vs. 27.5%). However, 376 unlisted species faced conversation threats, 297 species had unknown population trends, and 139 species were without an evaluation by the IUCN. Unlisted species appearing for the first time in records were imported 5.5 times more often relative to CITES‐listed species. Unlisted reptiles had the largest rate of entry, averaging 53 unique species appearing in imports for the first time per year. Overall trade quantities were approximately 11 times larger for imports of unlisted species relative to imports of CITES‐listed species. Countries that were top exporters of CITES‐listed species were mostly different from exporters of unlisted species. Because of the vulnerabilities of unlisted, traded species entering the United States and increasing global demand, we strongly recommend governments adapt their policies to monitor and report on the trade of all wildlife.
Publisher: California Digital Library (CDL)
Date: 06-07-2021
Publisher: Pensoft Publishers
Date: 18-08-2020
DOI: 10.3897/NEOBIOTA.60.51431
Abstract: Globalisation of the live pet trade facilitates major pathways for the transport and introduction of invasive alien species across longer distances and at higher frequencies than previously possible. Moreover, the unsustainable trade of species is a major driver for the over-exploitation of wild populations. Australia minimises the biosecurity and conservation risk of the international pet trade by implementing highly stringent regulations on the live import and keeping of alien pets beyond its international CITES obligations. However, the public desire to possess prohibited alien pets has never been quantified and represents a number of species that could be acquired illegally or legally under different future legislative conditions. As such, highly desirable species represent an ongoing conservation threat and biosecurity risk via the pet-release invasion pathway. We aimed to characterise the Australian desire for illegal alien pets and investigate potential sources of external information that can be utilised to predict future desire. Using public live import enquiry records from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment as a proxy for alien pet desire, we tested for differences in the proportion of species with threatened listings and records of invasions, after accounting for taxonomy. Additionally, we used a United States of America (U.S.) live imports dataset to infer pet demand in another Western market with less stringent regulations and determined whether species highly desired in Australia had higher U.S. trade demand than would be expected by chance. The Australian public desire for alien pets is heavily and significantly biased towards species threatened with extinction, species popular in the U.S. trade and species with a history of successful invasions. Not only does this indicate the potential impacts of pet desire on invasion risk and the conservation of threatened species, but we also highlight the potential role of the U.S. trade as an effective predictor for Australian desire. Our research emphasises the value of novel datasets in building predictive capacity for improved biosecurity awareness.
Publisher: California Digital Library (CDL)
Date: 28-01-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-05-2023
DOI: 10.1002/PAN3.10469
Abstract: Contemporary wildlife trade is massively facilitated by the Internet. By design, the dark web is one layer of the Internet that is difficult to monitor and continues to lack thorough investigation. Here, we accessed a comprehensive database of dark web marketplaces to search across c . 2 million dark web advertisements over 5 years using c . 7 k wildlife trade‐related search terms. We found 153 species traded in 3332 advertisements ( c . 600 advertisements per year). We characterized a highly specialized wildlife trade market, where c . 90% of dark‐web wildlife advertisements were for recreational drugs. We verified that 68 species contained chemicals with drug properties. Species advertised as drugs mostly comprised of plant species, however, fungi and animals were also traded as drugs. Most species with drug properties were psychedelics (45 species), including one genera of fungi, Psilocybe , with 19 species traded on the dark web. The native distribution of plants with drug properties were clustered in Central and South America. A smaller proportion of trade was for purported medicinal properties of wildlife, clothing, decoration, and as pets. Synthesis and applications . Our results greatly expand on what wildlife species are currently traded on the dark web and provide a baseline to track future changes. Given the low number of advertisements, we assume current conservation and biosecurity risks of the dark web are low. While wildlife trade is r ant on other layers of the Internet, particularly on e‐commerce and social media sites, trade on the dark web may still increase if these popular platforms are rendered less accessible to traders (e.g., via an increase in enforcement). We recommend focussing on surveillance of e‐commerce and social media sites, but we encourage continued monitoring of the dark web periodically to evaluate potential shifts in wildlife trade across this more occluded layer of the Internet. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Publisher: California Digital Library (CDL)
Date: 17-06-2022
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 06-01-2023
DOI: 10.1101/2023.01.05.522946
Abstract: The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans ( Bsal ) is a major potential threat to salamander bio ersity in North America, where it is not yet known to occur. In the United States, a 2016 policy restricted the trade in 20 salamander genera in attempts to prevent Bsal introduction. However, little comprehensive data is available to evaluate the impact of this policy action. Here, we collated a dataset of United States hibian imports from 1999 to 2021 and show that reported legal trade in the targeted taxa was effectively reduced by the ban. Unfortunately, hibian trade into the United States continues to risk Bsal introduction given that other species and genera now known to carry Bsal are still traded in large quantities (millions of live in iduals annually). Additional policy responses focused on Bsal carrier taxa, especially frogs in the genus Rana , could help mitigate the impact of Bsal on North American salamanders.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-04-2021
DOI: 10.1002/EAP.2314
Abstract: There is considerable evidence that keeping propagule pressure low can drastically reduce establishment probability of potential invasive species. Yet, most management plans and research efforts fail to explicitly acknowledge all three of the components of propagule pressure: size, number, and the risk–release relationship. It is unclear how failing to specify one or more of these components can influence the efficacy of management plans in preventing invasive species establishment. Furthermore, even if all components are acknowledged and quantified, there currently is no mathematical tool available to calculate the levels of propagule pressure that ensure attainment of a predetermined, and system‐specific, target establishment probability. Here, we quantify the resulting uncertainty in establishment probability when one or more components of propagule pressure is unknown by using parameter uncertainty analysis on realistic values of propagule pressure. In addition, to aid in the development of management plans that explicitly set propagule pressure limits, we develop a propagule‐pressure sensitivity analysis that we use to determine the required reduction in levels for propagule size and number (representative of management actions) to maintain a target establishment probability. We show that the precision of establishment estimates is highly dependent on knowledge of all three propagule pressure components, where the possible range of values for establishment probability can vary by over 50% without full specification. In addition, our sensitivity analysis showed that propagule size and number can be altered independently or in conjunction to lower establishment probability below a target level. Importantly, our sensitivity analysis was able to specifically quantify how much reduction in a propagule pressure component(s) is needed to reach a given target establishment probability. Our findings suggest that quantifying the three components of propagule pressure should be a priority for invasive species prevention moving forward. Furthermore, our sensitivity analysis tool can serve to guide the development of new invasive species management plans in a transparent and quantitative manner. Together with information on the costs associated with approaches to reducing propagule pressure, our tool can be used to identify the most cost‐effective approach to prevent invasive species establishments.
Publisher: California Digital Library (CDL)
Date: 18-02-2021
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 09-07-2021
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0254007
Abstract: Automated monitoring of websites that trade wildlife is increasingly necessary to inform conservation and biosecurity efforts. However, e-commerce and wildlife trading websites can contain a vast number of advertisements, an unknown proportion of which may be irrelevant to researchers and practitioners. Given that many wildlife-trade advertisements have an unstructured text format, automated identification of relevant listings has not traditionally been possible, nor attempted. Other scientific disciplines have solved similar problems using machine learning and natural language processing models, such as text classifiers. Here, we test the ability of a suite of text classifiers to extract relevant advertisements from wildlife trade occurring on the Internet. We collected data from an Australian classifieds website where people can post advertisements of their pet birds (n = 16.5k advertisements). We found that text classifiers can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, which listings are relevant (ROC AUC ≥ 0.98, F1 score ≥ 0.77). Furthermore, in an attempt to answer the question ‘how much data is required to have an adequately performing model?’, we conducted a sensitivity analysis by simulating decreases in s le sizes to measure the subsequent change in model performance. From our sensitivity analysis, we found that text classifiers required a minimum s le size of 33% (c. 5.5k listings) to accurately identify relevant listings (for our dataset), providing a reference point for future applications of this sort. Our results suggest that text classification is a viable tool that can be applied to the online trade of wildlife to reduce time dedicated to data cleaning. However, the success of text classifiers will vary depending on the advertisements and websites, and will therefore be context dependent. Further work to integrate other machine learning tools, such as image classification, may provide better predictive abilities in the context of streamlining data processing for wildlife trade related online data.
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Oliver Stringham.