Networks in the illegal wildlife trade

At no other time has the environment and its biodiversity been in such a vulnerable state, with the illegal wildlife trade implicated in the decline and extinction of a diverse range of species. The project will involve the application of novel and interdisciplinary analytical methods to combat the illegal trade in wildlife. Specifically, we will combine geographic profiling - originally developed in criminology and since extended to biological data sets - and network analysis based on electricity resistance theory. In doing so, we aim to predict the most likely supply routes between poaching events and exit ports, and the associated process of consolidation within the illegal wildlife trade network. In terms of the elephant ivory trade network, it has been suggested that there are as few as 100 large-scale ivory consignments that move out of Africa annually, but that these constitute up to 80% of the illegal trade. The potential of the methods developed on the wildlife trade application will also be applicable to other trade networks such as the illegal narcotics trade.

The proposed supervisory team will be interdisciplinary to ensure that the new developments are optimised to address the questions of interest.