A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade

Abstract

The unrivalled 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, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and collecting data. Here, we present an accessible guide for Internet‐based wildlife trade surveillance, which uses a repeatable and systematic method to automate data collection from relevant websites. Our guide is adaptable to the multitude of trade‐based contexts including different focal taxa or derived parts, and locations of interest. We provide information for working with the diversity of websites that trade wildlife, including social media platforms. Finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of web data, including the challenges presented by trade occurring on clandestine sections of the Internet (e.g., deep and dark web). Article Impact Statement: The Internet is a vast source of wildlife trade data and a generalizable framework is provided to research unexplored contexts of the trade