We map the countries and ecosystems of origin behind two decades of U.S. wildlife imports, revealing major gaps in global wildlife trade data and highlighting source regions facing the greatest biodiversity pressure from U.S. demand.
Using two decades of U.S. wildlife import records (2000–2022), we show that the United States traded over 21,000 species and 2.85 billion individuals, with more than half of individuals from most taxa sourced from the wild. The scale of legal trade far exceeds prior assessments, limiting decision-makers' ability to gauge its impact on species survival.