Browsing by Subject "data automation"

Internet has altered the wildlife trade as it is now easy to trade animals on different online platforms. In the reptile pet trade, distinct appearance and rarity of the species are sought after attributes. Reptiles with small ranges are especially threatened by the pet trade. The Lesser Antilles are home to nearly hundred endemic lizard and snake species which are facing many threats from climate change to habitat loss. In addition, some of them are subject to international pet trade the scale of which is still not assessed properly. In this thesis I have mapped the online pet trade in endemic reptile species of the Lesser Antilles. To do this, I built an automated data collection and processing tool consisting of Python scripts. I used the tool to scrape 366 951 reptile trade advertisements from 90 distinct websites and to filter and extract information on Lesser Antillean reptiles from the collected data. The results show that most of the Lesser Antillean reptile species traded online have not yet been fully assessed for their conservation status by the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Overall, 9,2% off the reptiles on online sales advertisements and 21,4% of the species sold online are assessed as Threatened (i.e., at highest risk of extinction). Only 24,8% of advertisements selling Lesser Antillean reptiles online concern species that are evaluated as not Threatened by the IUCN Red List of Species. Germany was found to be the centre of trade of Lesser Antillean reptile species as the number of trade advertisements and distinct species sold was the highest there. United States was the second biggest trader of all species and the biggest trader of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) listed species. These results show that it is of foremost importance to evaluate the conservation status of all species that are currently traded to fully assess the threat that the pet trade possesses to reptile species. It will also be important to assess the sustainability of the reptile trade, especially in Germany and the United States. The tool used to collect and process the data in this thesis can be modified to assess the pet trade of any species on publicly accessible online platforms