Gaps in global wildlife trade monitoring leave amphibians vulnerable

  1. Alice C Hughes  Is a corresponding author
  2. Benjamin Michael Marshall
  3. Colin T Strine
  1. Centre for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, China
  2. School of Biology, Institute of Science, Suranaree University of Technology, Thailand
7 figures, 1 table and 24 additional files

Figures

Breakdown of IUCN Redlist status of traded and not-traded amphibian species.

IUCN assessments based on data from AmphibiaWeb. Inclusion as a traded species based on appearance in online searches (2004–2019 and 2020 online contemporary sample), Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) (2000–2014), and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) data sources (1975–2019). Generated using Source code 8 and Source data 10.

Figure 2 with 4 supplements
Percentage of species in trade based on three combined contemporary datasets (Law Enforcement Management Information System [LEMIS], Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species [CITES], Online [yellow (0%)-red-black (100%)]).

Also see Figure 2—figure supplements 1, 2, 3, and 4 for patterns of individual countries and inventories.

Figure 2—figure supplement 1
Map of trade by country derived from Online, Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS), and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) trade data, and mapped using AmphibiaWeb distribution data.

(A) The number of amphibian species present in a country. (B) The number of species present in that country and also present in the trade. (C) The % of species found in a country that are traded.

Figure 2—figure supplement 2
Species traded from different trade inventories.
Figure 2—figure supplement 3
Maps of national statistics of species with different IUCN.

Redlist status and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) listing in trade.

Figure 2—figure supplement 4
Maps of threatened species in trade based on the three trade inventories.
Figure 3 with 6 supplements
Temporal trends in traded species 2000–2019.

(A) Trends over time of Online, LEMIS, and CITES datasets: (1) Raw counts of numbers of species detected in each year. (2) The number of species traded only in a particular year. (B) Exploration of trends in online trade: (1) Residuals from the linear regression of number of species detected against number of pages (df = 13, intercept = 58.73, number of pages coef. = 0.13). (2) Number of species per year. (3) Number of archived pages retrieved and searched. Generated using Source code 9 and Source data 7, 9, and 10. Also see Figure 3—figure supplements 16 for a breakdown of how many individuals are coming from the wild for taxa traded at different volumes.

Figure 3—figure supplement 1
Bar chart showing the number and origin of imported individuals per genera, subset to genera with over 1,000,000 individuals recorded.

Data from Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) 2000–2014. Red indicates those originating from the wild. Blue indicates those originating from captive operations (animals bred in captivity, commercially bred, and originating from a ranching operation). Labels top and bottom show the percentage of that genera from the wild or captive sources. Summary statistics per genera are provided in the caption.

Figure 3—figure supplement 2
Bar chart showing the number and origin of imported individuals per genera, subset to genera with between 1,000,000 and 100,000 individuals recorded.

Data from Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) 2000–2014. Red indicates those originating from the wild. Blue indicates those originating from captive operations (animals bred in captivity, commercially bred, and originating from a ranching operation). Labels top and bottom show the percentage of that genera from the wild or captive sources. Summary statistics per genera are provided in the caption.

Figure 3—figure supplement 3
Bar chart showing the number and origin of imported individuals per genera, subset to genera with between 100,000 and 10,000 individuals recorded.

Data from Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) 2000–2014. Red indicates those originating from the wild. Blue indicates those originating from captive operations (animals bred in captivity, commercially bred, and originating from a ranching operation). Summary statistics per genera are provided in the caption.

Figure 3—figure supplement 4
Bar chart showing the number and origin of imported individuals per genera, subset to genera with between 10,000 and 1000 individuals recorded.

Data from Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) 2000–2014. Red indicates those originating from the wild. Blue indicates those originating from captive operations (animals bred in captivity, commercially bred, and originating from a ranching operation). Summary statistics per genera are provided in the caption.

Figure 3—figure supplement 5
Bar chart showing the number and origin of imported individuals per genera, subset to genera with between 1000 and 100 individuals recorded.

Data from Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) 2000–2014. Red indicates those originating from the wild. Blue indicates those originating from captive operations (animals bred in captivity, commercially bred, and originating from a ranching operation). Summary statistics per genera are provided in the caption.

Figure 3—figure supplement 6
Bar chart showing the number and origin of imported individuals per genera, subset to genera with fewer than 100 individuals recorded.

Data from Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) 2000–2014. Red indicates those originating from the wild. Blue indicates those originating from captive operations (animals bred in captivity, commercially bred, and originating from a ranching operation). Summary statistics per genera are provided in the caption.

Summary of post-1999 described species and their presence in the trade.

(A) The species described post-1999 detected in the trade displaying the year of description and the year detected in the trade. (B) Species described post-1999 but were only detected in the 2020 snapshot. Alongside species names in A and B are their IUCN Redlist status; the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) appendix (where listed) is shown on the right of the plot. (C) Frequency plot showing the count of time lags between description and trade, with colours corresponding to broad summaries of IUCN Redlist status. Generated using Source code 11 and 12, and Source data 4, 7, and 10.

Number of species detected via each language in the online search.

Light blue shows the total number of species per language, and percentage of the overall online species list. Dark blue shows the number of species unique to a particular language and the percentage of that language’s species that are unique. Lollipop alongside bars describe the number of websites sampled. Generated using Source code 10 and Source data 1 and 3.

Upset plot showing the coverage and intersection of the five trade data sources.

The number of species per order is presented as an illustrative tree, alongside the % of the 8212 amphibian species in trade. The number of species that are covered by each CITES appendix is represented in the bottom left plot (red – not listed, light grey – Appendix I, medium grey - Appendix II, black – Appendix III). N.b., M&M 2019 is referring to Mohanty and Measey, 2019. Generated using Source code 8, and Source data 10.

Mapping diversity of species in trade for different uses based on the five data sources.

(A) Pet, (B) meat; (C) medicinal, (D) research, and (E) all trade.

Tables

Key resources table
Reagent type
(species) or
resource
DesignationSource or
reference
IdentifiersAdditional
information
OtherData S1 – Target Websites Censored.csvSelf-generated via the use of http://www.google.com/ and http://www.bing.com/Data S1Website review and sampling
OtherData S2. Original AmphibiaWeb data (‘AmphibiaWeb 2020-08-29.csv’)AmphibiaWeb: https://amphibiaweb.org/amphib_names.txtData S2Original AmphibiaWeb Data: Accessed 2020-08-29
OtherData S3. Snapshot Online Data.csvSelf-generatedData S3Online search results from the contemporary sample
OtherData S4 Temporal Online Data.csvSelf-generated via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine API and Terraristika (https://www.terraristik.com)Data S4Online search results from the temporal sample
OtherData S5 new_list_amp_jan_FINAL.csvSelf-generatedData S5Species listed purposes from each data source
OtherData S6 supplement_trade_keywords.csvSelf-generatedData S6List of keywords associated the importers and exporters
OtherData S7 LEMIS Data AmphiNames.csvSelf-generated by combining aspects of Data S1 and data from LEMIS: Eskew EA, White AM, Ross N, Smith KM, Smith KF, Rodríguez JP, Zambrana-Torrelio C, Karesh WB, Daszak P. 2019. United States LEMIS wildlife trade data curated by EcoHealth Alliance. Zenodo Dataset. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3565869Data S7Filtered LEMIS data with AmphibiaWeb compatible names: Retrieved using the lemis package: Ross N, Eskew EA, White AM, Zambrana-Torrelio C. 2019. lemis: The LEMIS Wildlife Trade Database.https://github.com/ecohealthalliance/lemis#readme
OtherData S8 Index_of_CITES_Species_[CUSTOM]_2020-09-20 15_51.csvCITES: http://checklist.cites.org/#/enData S8Filter CITES appendix data
OtherData S9 gross_imports_2020-09-20 15_25_comma_separated.csvCITES: https://trade.cites.org/#Data S9Filtered CITES data
OtherData S10 Amphibians_in_trade.csvSelf-generated using aspects of Data S2–S4, S7–S9Data S10The final dataset
OtherData S11. Amphibians_in_trade_METADATA.csvSelf-generatedData S11The final dataset metadata
Software, algorithmRR Core TeamPlease see appropriate code listed in text
Software, algorithmArcGisESRI
OtherIUCN species polygonsiucnredlist.org

Additional files

Source code 1

Code used to extract URLs from saved search result pages.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code1-v2.zip
Source code 2

Code to collect website data using the hierarchical search method.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code2-v2.zip
Source code 3

Code to collect website data from the wayback machine.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code3-v2.zip
Source code 4

Code used to implement string matching searches for species keywords.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code4-v2.zip
Source code 5

Code used to compile website search results with Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) data.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code5-v2.zip
Source code 6

Code used to filter initial Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) data.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code6-v2.zip
Source code 7

Code used to summarise and explore Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) data.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code7-v2.zip
Source code 8

Code used to generate summary figures.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code8-v2.zip
Source code 9

Code used to generate figures showing change over time.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code9-v2.zip
Source code 10

Code used to plot the different species counts between languages used during online searches.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code10-v2.zip
Source code 11

Code used to retrieve species authorities.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code11-v2.zip
Source code 12

Code used to calculate and plot lag times between species description and appearance in the trade.

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-code12-v2.zip
Source data 1

Website review and sampling (‘Target Websites Censored.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data1-v2.csv
Source data 2

Original AmphibiaWeb data (‘AmphibiaWeb 2020-08-29.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data2-v2.csv
Source data 3

Online search results from the contemporary sample (‘Snapshot Online Data.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data3-v2.csv
Source data 4

Online search results from the temporal sample (‘Temporal Online Data.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data4-v2.csv
Source data 5

Species listed purposes from each data source (‘new_list_amp_jan_FINAL.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data5-v2.csv
Source data 6

List of keywords associated the importers and exporters (‘supplement_trade_keywords.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data6-v2.csv
Source data 7

Filtered Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) data with AmphibiaWeb compatible names (‘LEMIS Data AmphiNames.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data7-v2.csv
Source data 8

Filter Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) appendix data (‘Index_of_CITES_Species_[CUSTOM]_2020-09-20 15_51.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data8-v2.csv
Source data 9

Filtered Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) data (‘gross_imports_2020-09-20 15_25_comma_separated.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data9-v2.csv
Source data 10

The final dataset (‘Amphibians_in_trade.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data10-v2.csv
Source data 11

The final dataset metadata (‘Amphibians_in_trade_METADATA.csv’).

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-data11-v2.csv
Transparent reporting form
https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/70086/elife-70086-transrepform-v2.docx

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  1. Alice C Hughes
  2. Benjamin Michael Marshall
  3. Colin T Strine
(2021)
Gaps in global wildlife trade monitoring leave amphibians vulnerable
eLife 10:e70086.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70086