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* Correspondence: Penthai Siriwat email: [email protected]
Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S037689291800005X
INTRODUCTION
The illegal trade in wildlife resources is one of the key threats to global biodiversity loss (Butchart et al. 2010). Trade occurs from local to global scales, most of which is unregulated, unsustainable and has detrimental effects on ecosystems (Duckworth et al. 2012). Due to its clandestine nature, there are several methodological difficulties in accurately monitoring the illegal wildlife trade, and the majority of previous work has been biased towards fauna over flora species (see Keane et al. 2008; Nijman 2010; Phelps & Webb 2015).
Although data on the illegal wildlife trade are inherently incomplete (Rosen & Smith 2010), seizure records such as in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) trade database are a main source of information on the trade of several wildlife and plant species (Ferriss 2014; D'Cruze & Macdonald 2016; UNODC 2016). Data can also be acquired through national governments, regional enforcement offices, non-governmental organizations (NGOs; e.g. World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and TRAFFIC; Gomez et al. 2016) or specific database systems for high-profile species (Rosen & Smith 2010; Underwood et al. 2013; Challender et al. 2015). Using the CITES seizure data by itself can be relatively limiting, for reasons such as the periodic time lag between trade occurring and trade reporting (UNODC 2016), dependency on reporting rates for each country (Pistoni & Toledo, 2010; Milliken et al. 2012) and inaccuracy or absence of information on domestic trade (Blundel & Mascia 2005; Giles et al. 2006; Phelps et al. 2010), as well as the overlooking of trade in non-CITES species (Bruckner 2001; Schlaepfer et al. 2005; Rhyne et al. 2012). Alternative monitoring methods are therefore increasingly utilized to fill data gaps (Phelps & Webb 2015). One such example is the use of publicly available news articles to monitor the trade of pangolins (Nijman 2015; Cheng et al. 2017).
Among plant species, timber is one of the most traded items (Brack 2003), with illicit timber logging accounting for a substantial volume of activity (Sundström 2016). Several initiatives have been launched to promote the sustainable trade of various species (Li & Chen 2015). This includes domestic...