Using Market Data To Fight The Wild Bird Trade Strategically
The illegal wildlife trade is worth an estimated $10 billion per year, involves tens of millions of animals around the world, and is extremely difficult to track. Additionally, the impact of the trade on species decline is largely unknown because current methods of monitoring wild animal populations are inefficient and expensive. This study, published in Biological Conservation, proposes a new method of identifying species that are being overexploited by the wildlife trade: by using historical and current market data on prices and trade volume. The authors hypothesized that species showing increases in market price but also decreases in trade volume are declining in the wild and becoming increasingly rare — and therefore more expensive.
The authors tested their hypothesis using a case study of birds being illegally trapped and sold in Indonesia, the global center of the pet bird trade. They first surveyed local ornithologists to determine what bird species were in decline and then used market data to assess changes in price and volume of each species. The resulting correlations largely supported the hypothesis, as all four species identified by experts as severely declining. Several species identified as declining were also increasing in price but decreasing in trade volume, and all six species that are not involved in wildlife trade were identified as either stable or increasing. Additionally, several species identified as declining were increasing in both price and volume, suggesting that they had recently become desirable and would later go into decline.
To evaluate the efficiency of their method, the authors conducted a small field monitoring study and compared its costs to those entailed by six weeks of market monitoring. They found that the market-based assessment cost 1/30th the price of traditional monitoring. While they note that their case study requires further validation with larger populations of animal species, the authors recommend a two-step process of carrying out “coordinated market monitoring followed by field studies of species whose market signals indicate declining populations.”