Wildlife Trade in Online Markets
What e-commerce and social data reveal about wildlife exploitation, regulation, and its side effects
Research Question
How does wildlife trade behave in online marketplaces — and what happens to demand when regulation intervenes?
Background
Online marketplaces leave long, fine-grained records of wildlife trade that traditional monitoring misses. With collaborators at the National Institute for Environmental Studies and beyond, this project line uses those records to evaluate conservation policy: trade bans can push demand into unregulated threatened species (Kubo et al. 2025, Conservation Letters), wildlife disease outbreaks reshape sales of management items (Endo et al. 2025, One Health), and a decade of listings traces trade pressure on land hermit crabs (Hsu et al. 2025, Global Ecology and Conservation).
Approach
Long-term marketplace datasets (millions of transactions across hundreds of species), causal inference around regulatory events, and text processing to identify species and trade context from the titles of traded items.
Representative Findings
Regulation is not free: banning trade in listed species measurably boosted trade in unregulated, threatened alternatives — an early-warning problem this project aims to make assessable before rules take effect.
Data & Code
Marketplace datasets contain seller information and cannot be redistributed; aggregated data accompany the individual papers.