Quantifying an online wildlife trade using a web crawler

Susanne Masters,Hugo De Boer,Panagiotis Madesis,Wilfred Gerritsen,Tinde Van Andel,Maarten Schermer,Bastien Anthoons,Seethapathy G Saroja,Rick Verdoes,Barbara Gravendeel,Arzu Karahan,Rachel Schwallier

doi:10.1007/s10531-022-02367-z

Abstract

Legally protected plants are illegally traded through online sales platforms and orchids are a significant component of this wildlife trade. This study focused on salep, a compound product made from wild collected orchid tubers from several genera—including Anacamptis, Dactylorhiza, Himantoglossum, Ophrys, Orchis, Serapias—whose harvest endangers some of the species used, despite their collection and sale being restricted by national and international legislation. Using a custom designed web crawler in combination with DNA barcoding of a subset of products over 18 months 1942 items of salep were detected as sold at a total value of US$ 37,775, estimated to be equivalent to 90,000 to 180,000 wild orchids being destructively harvested. Wild harvested tubers traded at a value of $0.21 and equivalent cultivated orchids have a market price of $16–28; cultivation is currently no viable alternative to wild harvesting. Using a web crawler on open trade sites contributes to knowledge on illegal wildlife trade, which can be used to address illegal plant trade at the national and international level.

Highlights

Market surveys are a longstanding method applied to investigate social and economic significance of plants and animals, and to identify wild-harvested products that present sustainability concerns (Cunningham 2014; D’Cruze et al 2020; Ticktin et al 2020)
Quantifying salep trade in economic value and number of individuals harvested In quantifying salep trade we found that the economic value of individual orchid tubers, and the plants destructively harvested to obtain them, is low
With one and sometimes two tubers collected per plant for salep, sales detected by the web crawler were estimated as the equivalent of 89,939–179,879 wild orchids being destructively harvested

Summary

Introduction

Market surveys are a longstanding method applied to investigate social and economic significance of plants and animals, and to identify wild-harvested products that present sustainability concerns (Cunningham 2014; D’Cruze et al 2020; Ticktin et al 2020). Online shopping by credit card started in 1994 with the purchase of a $12.48 music CD, and has rapidly grown to 1.66 billion people participating worldwide with a value of $2.3 trillion in Communicated by David Hawksworth. Extended author information available on the last page of the article. 2017, projected to rise to $4.48 trillion by 2021 (Lewis 1994; Statista 2018). Using an online trading platform as a place for collating trade data is an extension of physical market surveys, and is relevant as transactions increasingly occur online (Humair et al 2015; Nijman 2020; Siriwat and Nijman 2020; Xiao et al 2017; Ye et al 2020). While publicly displayed information such as that on e-trade sites is a fraction of content on the internet, concealed darkweb wildlife trade is negligible (Harrison et al 2016)

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion