Each group is expected to choose one problem statement (either regional or global) that they think they can best tackle
REGIONAL PROBLEM STATEMENT 1: COMMUNICATION TOOLS FOR WILDLIFE
The Challenge:
This problem statement covers the development of interactive communications tools that can help contextualize the threat of wildlife trafficking in relatable terms for both public audiences and conservation practitioners.
Create tools that assist in explaining the threat that consumer decisions pose in concrete terms to increasing and abetting wildlife trafficking, and the pressures that wildlife trafficking has on the survival of both iconic species and lesser-known ones.
Teams can address questions such as:
· How can conservationists create engaging, interactive visualizations using their own, or publicly available, data?
· How can we effectively communicate the decline of species(s) in the context of consumer behavior (see CITES)? How can we effectively communicate the violations of wildlife trade?
· How can we encourage positive awareness raising and behavior change based on this communication of knowledge?
· How can these tools be integrated into existing communication platforms (social media, government websites...etc) to most effectively communicate the message?
How can we address the importance of changing the laws and regulations and advocate for that?
Audience:
Teams should specifically state what type of users they are targeting with their tool (the general public? Conservationists? government? For example, a tool visualizing the trade and decline of the Egyptian tortoise would have a larger impact on audiences in North Africa than in the United States.
Follow-on Action:
Teams should aim their tool at a concrete message or action for the end user. The ultimate goal is that the end user adopts a behavior or takes action to address the aspect of wildlife trafficking that the tool addresses.
Usability & User Experience:
The software should be navigable and understandable for the layman, and one should be able to find their way around the software and easily achieve their intended purpose.
The Problem:
While knowledge of the impacts of wildlife trafficking and data sources exist, they are often not presented to audiences in a way that drives behavior change or action. Further, conservationists and wildlife trafficking enforcement agencies do not have the tools to develop these visualizations or communications themselves, and often struggle to communicate how destructive wildlife trafficking is on both individual species and ecosystems. This problem statement addresses the development of interactive communications tools that can help contextualize the impact of wildlife trafficking at the species level in relatable terms for both public audiences and conservation practitioners.
Wildlife trafficking is one of the largest drivers of extinction, and yet many people are not aware of the extent to which it drives extinctions on a global scale. In many cases, this is driven by direct purchase of wildlife products (i.e. pelts, traditional medicines, carved figurines); in others, by indirect pressures based on purchase of everyday items, such as materials using unsustainable palm oil. Understanding that the purchasing of the product is directly linked to precipitous declines in these species could lead to a behavior change in the consumer, and directly address this extinction pressure (as seen in major declines in the shark fin industry following communications campaigns around shark fin soup in China, Hong Kong and East Asia countries).
Many other people in the world, particularly in developed countries, are further removed from directly buying wildlife products (pelts, shells, etc.) but their consumer decisions have a larger macro-level effect on global ecosystems. Adapting purchasing behaviors towards eco-friendly product certifications such as shade-grown, species-safe (birds, tigers, or dolphins-safe, for example), low pesticide, etc., would result in large-scale ecological benefits. Even higher-level behavior change such as shifting away from high-meat diets or moving away from directly consuming at-risk species will have a large knock-on effect in removing demand for animal products (which increases the likelihood that species will be hunted or trafficked).
Meanwhile, conservationists and wildlife trafficking agencies have struggled to communicate the severity of wildlife trafficking to broad audiences. Many conservationists are not thoroughly trained in marketing, design, or communications, and are often highly trained in scientific theory and statistical rigor, which can be difficult to understand and often fails to effectively spur behavior change. There is a lack of tools that would allow conservationists to create user-friendly visualizations to communicate and contextualize the impacts of wildlife trafficking direct-to-consumer (i.e. tortoiseshell products) or impacted as an indirect byproduct of other types of consumption (i.e. dolphins caught in tuna nets).
While the challenge of wildlife trafficking is not new, a rising tide of interest in addressing this threat has coincided with an explosion of both digital and technological advances that have potential applications for helping to protect endangered wildlife.
For some internationally recognized “ambassador” species like African elephants and rhinos, there are robust data sets that could help paint a picture of the urgency of the crisis if interventions are not effective. For highly trafficked species in our region, such as the Greek tortoise, the Egyptian tortoise, Peregrine falcon and others, obtaining reliable and robust data can be tough, but figuring out a creative way to visually put the available data to use is part of the challenge!
Resources:
Red data book of mammals in Jordan. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344598484_National_Red_data_book_of_mammals_in_Jordan
Review on the Implementation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Jordan. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292157847_Review_on_the_Implementation_of_the_Convention_on_International_Trade_in_Endangered_Species_of_Wild_Fauna_and_Flora_CITES_in_Jordan
Illegal Trade in Wildlife Species in Beirut, Lebanon. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324276778_Illegal_Trade_in_Wildlife_Species_in_Beirut_Lebanon
Animal Trade in Amman Local Market, Jordan. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320396117_Animal_Trade_in_Amman_Local_Market_Jordan
Conservation Perspectives of illegal animal trade at Tabuk Local Market, Kingdome of Saudi Arabia. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292157593_Conservation_Perspectives_of_illegal_animal_trade_at_Tabuk_Local_Market_Kingdome_of_Saudi_Arabia
Preliminary assessment of the scope and scale of illegal killing and taking of birds in the Mediterranean
A list of animals and plants in Egypt that are protected by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora):
http://checklist.cites.org/#/en/search/country_ids%5B%5D=204&output_layout=alphab
etical&level_of_listing=0&show_synonyms=1&show_author=1&show_english=1&show
_spanish=1&show_french=1&scientific_name=&page=1&per_page=20
In general, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is a great place to search for available data resources for trafficked and threatened species (http://www.iucnredlist.org/).
The ploughshare tortoise profile provides a good example of some of the kinds of data available (http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/9016/0)
For African elephants, please see the IUCN African Elephant Status Report (https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/SSC-OP-060_A.pdf) for population data and the CITES MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) program for poaching data. A recent summary is here (https://cites.org/eng/news/pr/African_elephant_poaching_down_ivory_seizures_up_and_hit_record_high_24102017) and a detailed look at data sources is here (https://www.cites.org/eng/prog/mike/data_and_reports).
For rhinos, a good summary of poaching data is available from the Save the Rhino as well as estimated populations (https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino-info/).
The trading of birds:
Socio-economic studies:
https://www.cms.int/sites/default/files/uploads/meetings/MIKT1/NCE_BirdLife_Bird-Hunting-Along-the-Mediterranean-Coast-of-Egypt.pdf
https://www.cms.int/sites/default/files/document/Bird%20Hunting%20along%20the%20Mediterranean%20Coast%20of%20Egypt%20-%20Socioeconomic%20Study%20-%20Mr.%20Noor%20Noor.pdf
Commercial hunting:
https://www.facebook.com/100013236437374/videos/344001799384365/
https://arabic.cnn.com/middleeast/article/2019/04/25/egypt-falcons-smuggling-gulf
Integrated Taxonomic Information System - https://itis.gov/
Encyclopedia of Life - https://eol.org/
https://vidasilvestre.net/ - The VIDA SILVESTRE / Wildlife mobile application has been designed so that Inspectors, Customs Officers, Law Enforcement Officials and the public can identify different wildlife species and learn about the regulations that govern their protection, conservation and trade.
REGIONAL PROBLEM STATEMENT 2: WILDLIFE TRAFFICKING ON SOCIAL MEDIA
The Challenge:
The challenge is to create tools to assist the discovery and tracking of illegal wildlife materials & animals for sale on social media, and identify the accounts and ultimately, people behind the trade. Consider creating tools that will advance or augment current social media search efforts, addressing such questions such as:
· How can we automatically identify animals or wildlife materials that are of interest, from information available on social media?
· How can we identify a wildlife material once it has changed shape from original form (CITES labels this as “derivative” of animals ?
· How can we sort through millions of social media posts or accounts to find animals or wildlife materials that are of interest? How do we navigate the different privacy regulations?
· How can we automatically detect trends in location, wording used, tags of animals for sale, or other metadata related to trafficking?
· How can we detect networks of individuals via social media that will illuminate illicit trade routes?
· How can we gain access to private areas that contain information that is not publicly visible on social media?
The ultimate goal of these tools is not simply to shut down social media accounts, but to gain information on the trafficking network, and gain useful information that can be used in court. Any information about IP, location, networks, or the actual identity of the people behind the social media accounts are the most valuable information we could gain, and to have information from the social media accounts that can be unarguably traced back to them.
Design Criteria:
Access Gated:
Teams will be aware that those involved in wildlife trafficking having access to their tool may result in negative and unintended consequences, and will take that into account in the security or admin features of their tool.
Digital Backup:
Social media posts and accounts can be deleted. The tool should store the captured information in a manner that can be revisited in the case of a legal proceeding, if the accounts and images are deleted from the social media account.
The Problem:
Conservationists and law enforcement officials are becoming increasingly concerned about the use of social media for marketing and trading wildlife products (such as ivory) and live animals. This Problem Statement seeks tools that can be used on social media to quickly discover and identify illegally traded wildlife or wildlife materials, and illuminate the network behind the accounts.
The illegal trade of wildlife products is worth billions of US dollars annually. Increasingly, dealers and consumers are turning to internet social media and e-commerce platforms to illegally sell and purchase (traffic) live exotic animals. Monitoring these platforms for trafficking-related posts can help disrupt the illegal trade in live wild animals, and possibly lead to prosecutions of traffickers. However, monitoring is expensive and difficult to do manually. Live great apes, for example, frequently fall victim to Internet-facilitated trafficking. Over 6,000 great apes have been trafficked from the wild since 2005, and a further 30,000 have died in capture-related activities. Researchers have identified hundreds of social media accounts displaying illegally traded great apes, and have manually searched millions of social media photographs for evidence of trafficking. However, this method is cumbersome and prone to error, as many individual great apes are similar in appearance, making them difficult to track through the online trade chain as well as susceptible to misidentification and/or double counting.
In addition to live animal trafficking, social media accounts may also offer to sell illegal wildlife parts which may have changed form from the original. For example, a rhino horn may not have a typical horn shape: it may be carved (scrimshaw), shaped into jewelry, or powdered for traditional medicinal purposes. Additionally, when an account feels like it is being closed in on, it can delete the account and effectively vanish, then later set up a new account and rebuild connections.
The identification of websites and social networking accounts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) which advertise, sell, or buy illegal animal materials such as pelts, rhino horns, or ivory tusks, or objects made of these natural materials; or illegally trade in live animals, is fundamental to cracking down on wildlife trafficking. This knowledge is invaluable in understanding the structure of the international trafficking networks that comprise them, and creating effective strategies to disrupt these networks.
Resources:
· https://www.wired.com/story/tusks-horns-and-claws-inside-the-fight-to-destroy-the-animal-parts-bazaar-on-facebook
http://canal.ugr.es/noticia/scientists-develop-novel-algorithm-inspired-in-the-behavior-of-bee-colonies-which-will-help-dismantling-criminal-social-networks/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/social-media-illegal-wildlife-trade/
https://www.traffic.org/publications/search/?q=social+media
Facebook video and page showing a bird trader: https://www.facebook.com/100013236437374/videos/344001799384365/
IFAW + TRAFFIC report regarding Wildlife Cybercrime: disrupt: wildlife cybercrime: link here:
https://www.ifaw.org/international/resources/disrupt-wildlife-cybercrime
IFAW global wildlife cybercrime action plan: link here:
https://www.ifaw.org/international/resources/global%20wildlife%20cybercrime%20action%20plan
Wildlife trafficking: organized crime hit hard by joint INTERPOL-WCO global enforcement operation: https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2019/Wildlife-trafficking-organized-crime-hit-hard-by-joint-INTERPOL-WCO-global-enforcement-operation
REGIONAL PROBLEM STATEMENT 3: IDENTIFYING & TRACKING ANIMALS IN CAPTIVITY
The Challenge:
The challenge is to create tools that enable accurate, consistent identification and tracking of captive wild animals – in part to better monitor their impact on and entry into international markets for parts and products. Digital tracking could replace cumbersome and often incomplete paper trails, thereby improving accuracy, enforcement, preparedness and, ultimately, wildlife conservation globally.
Consider creating tools that will contribute to the tracking, data gathering, analysis, and/or monitoring of captive exotic species within a country. Tools should focus around demystifying the current captive exotic animal market, answering questions such as:
· How do we identify animals that are unreported through legal channels, in order to create a document record for them?
· How do we create a “life history” for an individual from many input sources?
· How do we identify an individual animal from many input sources, including photo or video?
· How do we use the “life history” to create a network of trade routes and identify illicit channels, including entries and exits from a country or region?
· How do we use these tools to identify intervention areas (illegal traders, poor animal husbandry, owners without permits) or hotspots to focus conservation efforts?
Design Criteria:
Allow Import of Data From Many Sources:
Initial information would rely on images and data provided by partners including qualified sanctuaries and zoos. Information may be in many different formats including videos and images of varying quality, with or without specific individuals being identified; PDFs or other receipts or certificates of purchase; Excel files with many individuals; and other types of documentation.
Date & Location Contextual Info:
Date and time should be considered mandatory metadata for new inputs. GPS location should be highly prioritized, and further data fields to give context to the entry should exist and be standardized where possible.
Digital Storage & Access Gated:
Tool should store or back up all data digitally so it can be accessed from anywhere, including in the field, via mobile, and in low-bandwidth situations. Teams will be aware that bad actors having access to their tool may result in negative and unintended consequences, and will take that into account in the security or admin features of their tool.
Identifying Features:
Tool should have some way of identifying an individual from data entries (which may be in many formats; see “Allow Import of Data…” criteria). This function will allow the individual to be identified, and for new data inputs to be identified as a specific individual within a degree of certainty.
Automated Grouping of New Information:
Ideally, the program would be capable of using the animals’ unique identifiers to automatically link multiple data entries of the same individual, along with the metadata and context data associated with it, to create a rich “profile” for each individual.
The Problem:
There are an unknown number of captive exotic animals, including apes, big cats, and canines located throughout the world. Through the course of their lifespan, these animals may change hands many times, making it difficult to follow the life of a single individual, as well as obscuring trade networks, and making it unclear whether individuals are leaving or entering a country.
This problem statement requests tools to demystify the trade and identification of captive exotic animals.
There are an unknown number of captive wild animals such as primates (including chimpanzees and lorises) and big cats (including tigers, African lions and leopards) located around the world. While some of these animals are cared for at qualified facilities and bred according to approved guidelines, many more are kept in private hands, and are bred, sold, traded, used for juvenile handling displays, and even marketed as pets. Laws governing ownership of these animals vary widely, and the often-unreported exchange of exotic animals among owners makes tracking and determining the fate of individual animals extremely difficult.
Often these animals are bought or traded when they are juvenile, and often the buyer does not take responsibility for a full lifespan of the animal as they grow larger, stronger, and often more aggressive. Many of these animals are abandoned in the wild, killed, or traded legally or illegally with other handlers. In the best of circumstances, it will be retired to a sanctuary, where the animal will be given lifetime care and not bred, handled, sold, or used for commercial gain.
However, generally these animals will change hands so many times that its entire “life history” (e.g. birth date, medical records, previous owners, locations of enclosures, housed with other exotic species, births, diet, etc.) is difficult or impossible to know.
Captive wild animals around the world are not uniformly tracked, so there is no way to guarantee that these animals are not entering international trade. For example, in the United States, this point has not been raised by U.S.-based conservation advocates, but also by foreign governments as a counter to U.S. calls for an end to exotic animal farming and trade abroad. U.S. exotic pet owners and handlers are able to transfer wild animals to other owners in a manner that makes them untraceable, and this presents a significant barrier to determining, for instance, what happens to the many animals bred for direct contact exhibits (where demand for juveniles is constant) each year (petting zoos). This is worrisome from a wildlife trafficking perspective because exotic animal parts and products have substantial monetary value.
Problem Background:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) share oversight of [exotic animal] trade – and have taken steps to close loopholes by strengthening Captive-Bred Wildlife (CBW) registration requirements for tigers (FWS) and considering a prohibition against direct contact between big cats and members of the public (USDA) – but USDA’s Animal Welfare Act inspection reports make clear that in many instances, owners are unable to account for the whereabouts of animals’ presence during attempts to piece together an animal’s “life history”.
Similarly, while CBW restrictions address commerce in certain big cat species, they do not include a mechanism for comprehensive tracking of individual animals.
Certain species have distinctive marks that are unique to each individual animal. Tigers, for instance, have stripe patterns that are unique to each animal, while individual lions have distinctive whisker patterns. Species characterized by spots or rosettes, such as leopards, jaguars and cheetahs, also have unique patterns and facial markings that may be used as identifiers.
In fact, technology has been used in conjunction with images of wild tigers captured from camera traps to link pelts recovered from poachers to their sources and relocate animals involved in human-wildlife conflict.
Resources:
Digital images of at least four tigers, four lions and two leopards will be provided by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Big Cat Rescue. For each of those individual animals, at least 25 images are available. A catalog of images of other individuals from each of these three species will be provided as well for testing/comparison purposes.
Egypt’s location is essential for migratory birds. Our country provides rest, food and recuperation for the millions of birds escaping the cold in Europe for the warmth of Africa every fall. Unfortunately, a lot of these birds’ journeys are cut short due to the unregulated hunting practices that take place on our coasts and the large electric power lines and wind turbines that cause the birds’ deaths due to collision and electrocution.
Monitoring report: http://www.natureegypt.org/portfolio-items/report-hunting-egypt/
Egypt is also known for its marine diversity. Places like the Salloum Marine Protected Area (https://www.salloum-mpa.com) lists Egypt’s corals, fish, reptiles and fauna.
IFAW shark identification poster: https://www.ifaw.org/international/resources/shark-id-poster
PROBLEM STATEMENT 4: REDUCING DEMAND ON WILDLIFE PETS
The challenge:
The challenge is to reduce the demand on wild cheetah cubs as pets in the Gulf States. Today, many influencers and middle to upper class citizens of the Gulf States take pride and put resources in getting cheetah cubs to keep as pets. Without demand, there is no market. These cubs usually come from countries in the horn of Africa where individual income is much lower than that of the Gulf States. The countries in the Horn of Africa lack the capacity for strict law enforcement against the poaching/capture and smuggling of Cheetahs. That is why, we are hoping you can help by finding a way to reduce the demand on cheetah cubs in the Gulf.
Design criteria:
Audience:
Teams should specifically state what type of users they are targeting with their tool. For example, a tool visualizing global shark decline from shark fin soup would have far less impact if used in the United States compared to being used in China.
Follow-on Action:
Teams should aim their tool at a concrete message or action for the end user. The ultimate goal is that the end user adopts a behavior or takes action to address the aspect of wildlife trafficking that the tool addresses.
Usability & User Experience:
The software should be navigable and understandable for the layman, and one should be able to find their way around the software and easily achieve their intended purpose.
The problem:
Between 100 to 300 cheetah cubs are leaving the horn of Africa and going to the Arabian Peninsula to become pets every year. This is a sad statistic considering how there may be as few as 300 pairs of adult cheetahs left in that region. A significant percentage of the offspring are leaving the region and sadly, half of them die during the smuggling journey. This is a huge loss to biodiversity because cheetahs are keystone species in that their presence on a landscape enhances species diversity across the landscape. What is even more sad is that the cubs that do survive end up living often only about a year, making the issue both an ecological crisis as well as a crisis of humane treatment of animals. A cheetah in a fenced yard is like placing an eagle in a small bird cage.
Problem background:
The cubs entering the gulf usually come from Ethiopia, Somalia and Northern Kenya. Under CITES, cheetahs cannot be traded or kept as pets. However, it seems rare that Gulf states enforce existing laws prohibiting possession of illegally acquired cheetahs. The Cheetah Conservation Fund has helped build a rescue center in Hargeisa to try and intercept smugglers. So far, they have been successful in stopping some cubs from going to the gulf. However, the cubs confiscated often cannot be released in the wild and are doomed to live the rest of their lives in captivity. The loss of biodiversity still stays the same. The only way to stop this cycle and to prevent cubs from leaving the wild is to decrease the demand for them as inappropriate pets.
Resources:
The Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF; https://cheetah.org/ ) works to humanely house cheetahs confiscated from smugglers but they also hope to end the illegal trade of cheetahs
( https://cheetah.org/learn/illegal-pet-trade/ ). The Horn of Africa Wildlife Enforcement Network (HAWEN; https://www.hawen.org/ ) helped convene a workshop in March 2020 in Addis Ababa discussing the cheetah trafficking problem. At that event, independent researcher Patricia Trichorache partnered with CCF and produced this presentation.
IFAW blog: watching Tiger King? here’s what you should know (and how you can help) – link here: https://www.ifaw.org/international/journal/tiger-king-what-you-should-know
REGIONAL PROBLEM STATEMENT 5: ON COVID (bonus)
The challenge:
With evidence indicating that the source of many of the causes of epidemics and diseases common to humans (viruses, parasites, etc.), which infect humans originate from the wrongful handling of animals and wildlife trade. The main challenge for us is to regulate and control the trade in wildlife, and thus prevent more pandemics from taking place in the future.
- How are wildlife trade and animal markets linked to COVID-19?
- Why are animal markets the perfect incubators for spreading diseases from animals to humans?
- What can NGOs, governmental initiatives and conservationists do to help mitigate the chances of another pandemic such asCOVID-19?
- What measures have countries taken to combat wildlife trade and potential sources of disease epidemics?
- What can the public do to support the conservationists’ efforts?
- How can IT and technology help us all prevent the next pandemic?
- How can we utilize technology to gather information and enforce the right implementation of international agreements such as CITES? Moreover, national laws depend on the country.
Teams can address questions such as:
• How can conservationists create engaging, interactive visualizations using their own, or publicly available, data?
• How can we effectively communicate the decline of species(s) in the context of consumer behavior (see CITES)? How can we effectively communicate the violations of wildlife trade?
• How can the communication with the public be effective and how we can convince them that touch with animals in general, especially wild animals is danger
• How can we encourage positive awareness raising and behavior change based on this communication of knowledge?
• How can these tools be integrated into existing communication platforms (social media, government websites...etc) to most effectively communicate the message?
• How can we address the importance of changing the laws and regulations and advocate for that?
General note
The main problem is clearly the lack of specific policy solutions to mitigate the risks of pandemics caused by diseases originating from zoonotic transmission. Although the underlying risk factor is the same everywhere, namely direct contact between a wild animal and a human, policy solutions will not be the same in the various geographies where we work. Around the world consumer markets for wildlife are different, the risks of zoonotic transmissions in those markets are different, legislative frameworks are different and compliance and enforcement challenges are different. That said, we do urge governments to develop clear policies that regulate legal trade of wildlife, humane and correct animal handling protocols based on criteria to safeguard biodiversity, public health and safety as well as animal health and welfare, combined with vigorous enforcement and meaningful penalties that stigmatize wildlife consumption and thus support demand reduction efforts as well.
Background about COVID-19 source
• SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19) is thought to have originated from a wild animal coronavirus that infected people (a zoonotic transmission). The origin is currently believed to be an animal market where a variety of animal species, including protected wildlife, were illegally sold. Stress of captivity weakens the animals’ immune systems, and creates an environment where mutating viruses can jump from one species to another.
• According to China’s official media Xinhua, CDC experts identified this novel coronavirus from environmental samples collected at the market, indicating the virus came from wildlife sold at the market.
o Source:http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-1/27/c_138735677.htm
• According to a sign at the Wuhan Huanan animal market, where scientists believe the virus has originated, there was a wide variety of animals offered for sale: live peacocks, porcupines, rats, foxes, crocodiles, wolf cubs, turtles, snakes, frogs, wild pigs, and meats, feet, blood, intestines and other body parts from all of the above and more. Over one hundred items from over 70 species were on offer.
• In general, any type of wildlife trade, both legal and illegal, brings with it the risk of zoonotic pathogen transmissions.
• The repeated outbreaks of zoonotic diseases (such as the bird flu, SARS, Ebola, HIV/AIDS and now COVID-19) demonstrate that controlling wildlife trade is not just a conservation and animal welfare issue. It is an animal and public health issue, a biosafety issue, an economic issue and a national security issue.
COVID-19 can be seen as a wakeup call for humans to reflect on our relationship with animals, and better control how we interact with animals. Animals are not to blame for outbreaks of viruses, humans are the ones who need to change our consumption and destructive behavior. The destruction of natural spaces is reducing habitat availability and bringing wildlife closer to human population. These dual stressors can contribute to the opportunity for a zoonotic outbreak.
Resources:
IFAW:
Beyond COVID-19: preserving human health by reinventing our relationship with wildlife - https://www.ifaw.org/international/resources/preserving-human-health-reinventing-relationship-with-wildlife-report
Global Problem Statement 1: Human Encroachment, A Decision-Making Tool
Profiling and Combating Zoonotic Disease Risk from Wildlife Trafficking, Wildlife Markets, and Human Encroachment: A Decision-Making Tool
Organization: The Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) at the U.S. Department of State and USAID Regional Development Mission for Asia
Overview of the Problem:
A majority of emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential originate from wildlife, such as coronaviruses, Influenza, Ebola, and HIV/AIDs. Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, experts around the world have emphasized importance of characterizing spillover risk in different locales and in different species.
Wildlife trafficking, wildlife consumption for food and medicine, and encroachment into wildlife habitat are forms of contact that drive the emergence of zoonotic disease. High-risk wildlife wet markets, in which wildlife is slaughtered and sold alongside many different species, are hotbeds for wildlife trafficking and create key zoonotic disease risks. These markets keep many different species, which would never otherwise be found in nature, together in cramped conditions. Often these markets are not well-regulated or inspected for legality or public health and hygiene standards.
Destruction of protected wildlife habitat and encroachment into wildlife habitat areas also increase the risk of zoonotic disease. Poorly regulated forms of encroachment, such as from illegal mining and illegal logging operations into wildlife habitat puts humans closer to wildlife — which leads to greater transmission risk of pathogens into human communities. Encroachment also makes it easier for wildlife traffickers to poach protected species. Construction of illegal roads not only paves the way for illegal mining and logging, wildlife trafficking, and illicit drug production, but also increases zoonotic disease risk.
Understanding risk of spillover from wildlife – through wildlife trafficking, consumption, high-risk markets, and encroachment- is fundamental to developing effective prevention and risk mitigation. A better understanding of risk can inform policy and regulations aimed at reducing emerging disease risk associated with wildlife trade. The assessment of specific markets as “high risk” or “low risk” with regard to spillover can also inform targeted interventions by public health or law enforcement professions, which is important in the face of scarce financial resources.
The Challenge: Identify, manage, and reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases, from wildlife trafficking and consumption, wildlife markets, or human encroachment into wildlife habitat. For example:
· The risk profiles of wildlife markets with regard to pathogen spillover vary among markets. Some markets will be “high risk” and others will be “low risk”. The challenge is to:
a) evaluate the most relevant criteria to be part of a risk profile (e.g. certain species or practices, such as slaughter on site), and evaluate a process for obtaining this information (preferably by “citizen scientists”), and propose a pipeline or platform for this data collection,
b) map networks of trade and other activities (e.g. patterns of consumption or encroachment) that contribute to spillover and amplification risk, and
c) to incorporate parts 1 and 2 into a decision making tool for interventions in wildlife markets, based on the risk of zoonotic spillover and transmission in specific wildlife markets. The ranking guidelines and methodology should be validated in different countries with varying wildlife trade and marketing contexts.
Resources:
Woods, M., Crabbe, H., Close, R. et al. Decision support for risk prioritisation of environmental health hazards in a UK city. Environ Health 15, S29 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-016-0099-y
Huong NQ et al. Coronavirus testing indicates transmission risk increases along wildlife supply chains for human consumption in Viet Nam, 2013-2014. PLoS One. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237129
UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Characterizing Livestock Markets for Real Time Decision Making: The Market Profiling Application. Sept 2019. http://www.fao.org/3/ca6132en/ca6132en.pdf
Global Problem Statement 2: Automating data preprocessing and display
Organization: Vulcan Inc.
Problem Statement 2: Organizations trafficking wildlife products can be highly complex, involving many people and functional units. Disabling these organizations effectively is a challenging task, often tackled by identification of key individuals or relationships for intervention via known connections (following the money). Identifying these leverage points often involves synthesizing a huge amount of data, such as car registrations, gun registrations, financial transactions, informant information, known personal relationships, and when people are seen together. Graph representations are often helpful in making sense of it all, but collecting and processing all relevant data to generate these graphs can be hugely time-consuming. A tool to automate preprocessing, ingestion, and display of this data would save valuable investigator time.
Possible bonus features:
a. Low-impact way for informants to submit additional information
b. Graph Machine Learning to automatically classify individuals or connections of interest, or to hypothesize missing connections.
Semantica AI is a possible source of inspiration, though their pricing model is prohibitive for many organizations.
· Graph theory, conceptual overview: https://medium.com/basecs/a-gentle-introduction-to-graph-theory-77969829ead8
· Survey on machine learning graph applications: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.03675.pdf
· Possible datasets: Synthesize similar to datasets at https://icon.colorado.edu/, and the output goal of the ingestion process should be data in forms similar to those there.
· Possible raw input files could include spreadsheets of vehicle identification numbers and license plates, separate spreadsheets of ownership information, lists of known associate groups, incident reports with names, dates, vehicles, and weapons, financial transactions between people or companies, and so on.
Global Problem Statement 3: a herd/group behavior identifier algorithm
Organization: Vulcan Inc.
Problem Statement 3: Many animal populations vulnerable to poaching are tracked to some degree with collared or tagged individuals. Identification of when and where these groups are threatened would enable better-targeted interventions on their behalf. The ability to ingest and at a high level characterize the behavior of animal groups such as those available at movebank.org would support the protection of wide-ranging or remote animal populations. Create a herd/group behavior identifier algorithm that can ingest this track information along with a list of poaching incidents with a wide time and location window (self-generated for testing, as this information is sensitive) and outputs an estimation of where in the track these incidents occurred.
· Behavior/anomaly detection primer: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-note-about-finding-anomalies-f9cedee38f0b
· An example of track-based behavior detection: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265964999_Automatic_detection_of_suspicious_behavior_of_pickpockets_with_track-based_features_in_a_shopping_mall
Possible datasets:
· Those available at movebank.org
· Relevant sets available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/ or data.gov, such as https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/sea-turtle-satellite-telemetry-data
Global Problem Statement 4: Protecting Wildlife and People from the Risks of Online Trafficking in Wildlife
Organization: TRAFFIC
Problem Statement POC: Giavanna Grein (Giavanna.grein@traffic.org), Senior Program Officer
Title of Problem Statement: Protecting Wildlife and People from the Risks of Online Trafficking in Wildlife
The Problem:
The current pandemic has revealed the fragile link between human health and wildlife exploitation, and how poorly regulated and illegal trade in wildlife can catalyze disease transmission and shatter global economies. The World Health Organization determined that COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease, meaning it originated from an animal. Other zoonotic diseases to date have included SARS, Ebola, Bird Flu, and MERS. COVID-19 is suspected to have originated in bats and may have jumped to humans via an intermediary wild species like the pangolin. With physical wildlife markets under scrutiny or suspended and people under lockdown in many countries to stop the spread of COVID-19, sellers are turning to online marketplaces and social media platforms to offload stockpiles of live wildlife, wildlife products and meat originally destined for physical markets. The sale of these items online further increases the risk of disease transmission to human populations through the use of delivery and express courier services, or direct selling to interested buyers in person. Online market places have been increasingly exploited by wildlife traffickers over the last decade, with social media platforms now serving as the main mechanism to connect buyers and sellers. TRAFFIC and NGO partners WWF and IFAW convene the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online which unites the tech sector to reduce wildlife trafficking online. This Coalition, which is comprised of 36 member companies including Google, Facebook, eBay, Alibaba and Tencent, works to standardize prohibited wildlife policies, train company staff to better detect illicit wildlife products such as elephant ivory and live tiger cubs, enhance automated detection filters, and educate and empower users to report suspicious listings. The Coalition has achieved great success to date, including over 3.3 million listings blocked or removed by company members in two years, though the widespread trade in live animals online is still a challenge that requires technology solutions.
The Challenge:
Convenors of the Coalition, as well as tech company enforcement teams, are limited in capacity for manually searching online platforms for prohibited live animals for sale. This process is very resource-intensive and inefficient when searching on a global scale. To reduce the trade in high-risk live animals that may transmit zoonotic diseases to humans across global supply chains, the challenge is to develop a tool that will identify and alert these sales taking place on one social media platform in one language as a starting point, with the potential to scale to additional platforms and languages in future. This will allow TRAFFIC, NGO partners and law enforcement agencies to flag new demand trends and emerging markets — and therefore target where action is needed to mitigate or eliminate risk.
Criteria:
· The tool developed should be able to scan one social media platform to identify high-risk live animals offered for sale. If feasible in the time provided, it would be great to capture information on where the seller is located, contact details, where they will ship the animal, any buyer information available, any reference to the health of the animal, the number of animals available, and which species are offered.
· The tool should be able to search in one language to start, with the ability to scale in future to include multiple languages. Zoohackathon participants may choose which language to include based on location. Sample languages include: Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Vietnamese.
· The tool should include a warning system that will alert TRAFFIC of these risks to coordinate a response.
Things to consider that make online monitoring challenging:
o Sellers are able to create, delete and recreate accounts and profiles as needed to avoid detection.
o Not all sellers list an animal as for sale, or even include the name of the species. Some may simply use images of the animal as a means of advertising and let interested buyers comment on their posts. From there the conversations are taken into private communications like WhatsApp chats. Language in the comments will include things like ‘PM/DM’ for price and how much?
o Many of the listings for live animals are found in private groups which will require admission by a group administrator.
o It is important to note that the sale of endangered wildlife is an illegal activity and that many buyers and sellers involved are criminals. No member of your team should engage with these sellers directly, or like/comment any of their content. Nor should any member attempt to purchase any animals or products.
Data Sets and Other Resources:
· To learn more about illegal wildlife trade online visit the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online website.
· To review online monitoring reports from TRAFFIC visit the publication page.
· To learn more about the link between COVID-19 and wildlife trade see TRAFFIC’s Wildlife trade, COVID-19 and zoonotic disease risks: shaping the response report.