Thirty-six years of legal and illegal wildlife trade entering the USA

Maria Therese Bager Olsen,Derek P Tittensor,Neil D Burgess,Katarzyna Nowak,Jonas Geldmann,Pablo Sinovas,Mike Harfoot,Becky Price,Nathan J Sanders

doi:10.1017/s0030605319000541

Abstract

AbstractThe USA is the largest consumer of legally, internationally-traded wildlife. A proportion of this trade consists of species listed in the Appendices of CITES, and recorded in the CITES Trade Database. Using this resource, we quantified wildlife entering the USA for 82 of the most frequently recorded wildlife products and a range of taxonomic groups during 1979–2014. We examined trends in legal trade and seizures of illegally traded items over time, and relationships between trade and four national measures of biodiversity. We found that: (1) there is an overall positive relationship between legal imports and seizures; (2) Asia was the main region exporting CITES-listed wildlife products to the USA; (3) bears, crocodilians and other mammals (i.e. other than Ursidae, Felidae, Cetacea, Proboscidea, Primates or Rhinocerotidae) increased in both reported legal trade and seizures over time; (4) legal trade in live specimens was reported to be primarily from captive-produced, artificially-propagated or ranched sources, whereas traded meat was primarily wild sourced; (5) both seizures and legally traded items of felids and elephants decreased over time; and (6) volumes of both legally traded and seized species were correlated with four attributes of exporting countries: species endemism, species richness, number of IUCN threatened species, and country size. The goal of our analysis was to inform CITES decision-making and species conservation efforts.

Highlights

The international trade in wildlife and wildlife products is worth billions of dollars and involves hundreds of millions of plants and animals from tens of thousands of species (Harfoot et al, )
Data were extracted from the CITES Trade Database, managed by the United Nations Environment Programme– World Conservation Monitoring Centre on behalf of the CITES Secretariat, which compiles all international wildlife trade data submitted by national CITES authorities in their annual reports to the Convention
We modelled the scale of imports across countries into the USA using a generalized linear model (GLM) accounting for a suite of explanatory variables related to the exporting country: ( ) species richness, ( ) level of endemism, ( ) country size, and ( ) the number of IUCN threatened species (i.e. Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable) in the country (Table )

Summary

Introduction

The international trade in wildlife and wildlife products is worth billions of dollars and involves hundreds of millions of plants and animals from tens of thousands of species (Harfoot et al, ). This trade includes timber, live plants, animals as pets, skins, and animal parts used for medicine, food and trophies (Wyler & Sheikh, ; Harfoot et al, ). Species of wild animals and plants is legal, sustainable, traceable and does not jeopardize the survival of these populations in the wild (CITES, c) These aims are achieved through a set of rules that regulate and monitor trade, including through a licensing system and requirements to assess that trade is not detrimental to populations before it is permitted; i.e. through national-level non-detriment findings (Hemley, ; CITES, a,b). CITES is one of the most important multilateral environmental agreements for reducing biodiversity loss and has played a pivotal role in regulating the international trade of threatened species

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