News release

From: PNAS

Uncovering illegal wildlife trade routes

Researchers developed a tool to predict illegal trade corridors for native Mexican parrots. Illegal wildlife trade threatens biodiversity and increases the risk of disease spread. However, trafficking networks are difficult to uncover, leaving law enforcement in a reactive position. To predict parrot trafficking routes in Mexico, George Olah and colleagues modeled confiscations of 20 native parrot species made from 1997 to 2024 as an electrical grid, with birds flowing from their native habitat along roads, just as electrical charge might flow on a wire.

The authors incorporated seven criminological factors influencing wildlife theft, including whether a species is accessible or easy to export. The model identified key roads and showed that the routes are concentrated rather than diffuse, with the highest concentration of flow in southeastern Mexico. The resulting map was converted into an interactive online tool for law enforcement that can be filtered by species to identify potential routes in local jurisdictions. The authors analyzed the confiscation data over time, including periods before and after a 2008 Mexican ban on native parrot trade. The analysis showed that, by 2020, the main driver had shifted from poverty to human population size and urban demand. According to the authors, other illicit trade networks often share routes with wildlife trafficking, rendering the map a potential tool for identifying and dismantling such shared logistics.