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discussion / AI for Conservation  / 9 September 2024

AI & Illegal Wildlife Trade

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How effective is the use of AI in monitoring and regulating the illegal wildlife trade? 

Are there any notable case studies and research examples available demonstrating its success and challenges in this field? 



John Simeone
@JSimeone
I run a small consulting company, Simeone Consulting, LLC, that provides research, data-driven analysis, technical expertise, and writing related to the production, consumption, and international trade of natural resources.

20 September 2024 5:08pm

Hi Ahmed - I'm involved in a couple different initiatives that are leveraging AI/ML to assist in monitoring and detecting potentially suspicious and illegal trade. Here are some papers that we've already published -- and we have several more in the works/under review currently. I can post them here in this thread once published: 

●Truszkowski, J. M., R. Maor, R. Bin Yousuf, S. Biswas, C. Chater, P. Gasson, S. McQueen, M. Norman, J. Saunders, J. Simeone, N. Ramakrishnan, A. Antonelli, and V. Deklerck. pre-print, forthcoming. A probabilistic approach to estimating timber harvest location. https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/5059/

● Datta, D., N. Self, J. Simeone, A. Meadows, W. Outhwaite, N. Elmqvist, and N. Ramakrishnan. 2023. TimberSleuth: Visual Anomaly Detection with Human Feedback for Mitigating the Illegal Timber Trade. Information Visualization. https://doi.org/10.1177/14738716231157081

● Datta, D., S. Muthiah, J. Simeone, and A. Meadows. 2021. Scrutinizing Shipment Records to Thwart Illegal Timber Trade. Outlier Detection and Description Workshop, ACM SIGKDD 2021. https://oddworkshop.github.io/assets/papers/7.pdf

● Datta, D., M.R. Islam, N. Self, A. Meadows, J. Simeone, W. Outhwaite, C. Hin Keong, A. Smith, L. Walker, and N. Ramakrishnan. 2020. Detecting Suspicious Timber Trades. Proceedings from the Thirty-Second Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-20). NY, NY. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i08.7032

● Mortier, Thomas, Jakub Truszkowski, Marigold Norman, Markus Boner, Bogdan Buliga, Caspar Chater, Henry Jennings, et al. “A Framework for Tracing Timber Following the Ukraine Invasion.” Nature Plants 10, no. 3 (March 2024): 390–401. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01648-5.
(The researchers from World Forest ID who lead the above paper - together with Virginia Tech Computer Science, UW Remote Sensing and Isotope labs, and me are all now on a NSF grant to further this work together). 

Also, here are a couple of other recent relevant papers by other teams of researchers: 

● Gore, Meredith L., Emily Griffin, Bistra Dilkina, Aaron Ferber, Stanley E. Griffis, Burcu B. Keskin, and John Macdonald. “Advancing Interdisciplinary Science for Disrupting Wildlife Trafficking Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 10 (March 7, 2023): e2208268120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208268120.

●Wing, Kate, and Benjamin Woodward. “Advancing Artificial Intelligence in Fisheries Requires Novel Cross-Sector Collaborations.” ICES Journal of Marine Science, August 28, 2024, fsae118. https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsae118.