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Browsing by Subject "wildlife trade"

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  • Animals of the Digital Age : Assessing digital media for public interest and engagement in species threatened by wildlife trade. 
    Redding, Alisa (2023)
    The sixth wave of mass species extinction currently threatens biodiversity and life on Earth as we know it. Conservationists seeking to protect threatened species are tasked with raising awareness and achieving funding for these protections, often by appealing to the public. In modern-day conservation research, digital data holds an increasingly important role in understanding conservation goals, messaging, and impacts. The media especially is a key player in disseminating information to the public about conservation. The data for this thesis was retrieved by an automated pipeline that collects Google News articles on species in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) (Di Minin & Kulkarni 2021). I used a descriptive approach to assess species information and popularity online, as well as the location and temporality of that information and popularity. I supplemented the dataset with metrics from Facebook to investigate article popularity, Google to investigate species popularity, and Wikipedia to investigate temporal trends in species interest. The quantitative results show an expected bias towards large, terrestrial mammals. Large cats are cited frequently across all data metrics. Popular headlines employ emotional or political language to attract readers. Frequently used words in titles of popular articles highlight diminishing populations, new or rare species, and certain species like whales, pangolins, rhinos, and turtles. The majority of the news organizations in the dataset are based in the United States. The United States is also most frequently mentioned in the text of the articles, though India and China lead with the highest number of species with native ranges in their countries. Wikipedia pageviews reveal the fluctuations in online species interest, and possible reasons are investigated through the article titles. The results reveal that charismatic, large mammals receive the highest attention in the media, and among the public. Results also showcase the potential of the pipeline and database for further development and addressing research gaps. Overall, the investigations in this thesis provide avenues to improve conservation messaging and address conservation biases.
  • Mapping online pet trade in endemic reptile species of the Lesser Antilles using automated data collection and processing 
    Rinne, Jooel (2022)
    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

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