About
48
Publications
34,804
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
852
Citations
Publications
Publications (48)
The number of alien reptiles and amphibians introduced and established worldwide has increased over the last decades. The legal pet trade is now the dominant pathway by which individuals of these species arrive in their non‐native locale. Despite its importance, specific factors of pet trade pathway that influence the release (introduction) of exot...
The unrivaled growth in e‐commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume and frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach that lacks an accessible frame...
Automated monitoring of websites that trade wildlife is increasingly necessary to inform conservation and biosecurity efforts. However, e-commerce and wildlife trading websites can contain a vast number of advertisements, an unknown proportion of which may be irrelevant to researchers and practitioners. Given that many wildlife-trade advertisements...
Live animal smuggling presents a suite of conservation and biosecurity concerns, including the introduction of invasive species and diseases. Yet, understanding why certain species are smuggled over others, and predicting which species will be smuggled, remains relatively unexplored. Here, we compared the live reptile species illegally smuggled to...
Contemporary wildlife trade is massively facilitated by the Internet. By design, the dark web is one layer of the Internet that is difficult to monitor and continues to lack thorough investigation.
Here, we accessed a comprehensive database of dark web marketplaces to search across c. 2 million dark web advertisements over 5 years using c. 7 k wild...
Effective regulation is essential for preventing the establishment of new invasive plants and managing the environmental, social, and economic impacts of those already established. Invasive plants are regulated by jurisdictions at a variety of local, regional, national, and international levels. Enhanced coordination of policy and regulations has b...
Reptiles and amphibians are popular in the exotic pet trade, where Australian species are valued for their rarity and uniqueness. Despite a near‐complete ban on the export of Australian wildlife, smuggling and subsequent international trade frequently occur in an unregulated and unmonitored manner. In 2022, Australia listed over 100 squamates in Ap...
Environmental DNA (eDNA) has recently emerged as an effective tool for invasive species biosecurity. We explored the use of eDNA for the detection of khapra beetle (Trogoderma granarium, Everts 1898), an invasive insect of cereal grains and other food products that has a high global economic impact. We developed a novel method for aggregating khapr...
The unsustainable use of wildlife is a primary driver of global biodiversity loss. No comprehensive global dataset exists on what species are in trade, their geographic origins, and trade's ultimate impacts, which limits our ability to sustainably manage trade. The United States (US) is one of the world's largest importers of wildlife, trade data b...
The increasing popularity of online commerce provides a new opportunity to investigate and quantify the dynamics of pet trade. Understanding these dynamics, including relationships between species characteristics and a species’ relative abundance in trade, can assist in informing trade regulation for conservation and biosecurity. We identified the...
Terrestrial arthropods are a diverse taxonomic group of significant ecological and economic importance. Our ability to understand the diversity that comprises this group is hampered by the variety of sampling techniques and high level of taxonomic expertise required to identify individual species. DNA metabarcoding approaches have potential to over...
Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), one of two fungal pathogens that cause the deadly amphibian disease chytridiomycosis, is a major impending threat to salamander biodiversity in North America, where it is not yet known to occur. In the United States, a 2016 wildlife trade policy restricted trade in 20 salamander genera in attempts to preven...
Invasive plants seriously impact our environmental, agricultural and forestry assets, and the ornamental plant trade is a major introduction pathway. The variety and extent of the ornamental plant trade is growing in reach and is increasingly facilitated by the internet (i.e., through e-commerce). A lack of surveillance and regulation of e-commerce...
The trade and keeping of exotic pets has serious implications for both biosecurity and biodiversity conservation. In Australia, the online trade of live invertebrates is an understudied and unregulated issue, with almost non‐existent monitoring. It is uncertain what species are being traded, whether they are being identified correctly, and how they...
The international trade of non-domesticated pets impacts both conservation and biosecurity via the harvest and release of live animals beyond their native distributions. The extent to which individual countries mitigate these impacts via regulation of trade is inconsistent, as is their capacity to monitor internet facilitated trade. We investigated...
Invasive plants seriously impact our environmental, agricultural and forestry assets, and the ornamental plant trade is a major introduction pathway. The variety and extent of ornamental plant trade is growing in reach and is increasingly facilitated by the internet (i.e., through e-commerce). A lack of surveillance and regulation of e-commerce has...
The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans ( Bsal ) is a major potential threat to salamander biodiversity in North America, where it is not yet known to occur. In the United States, a 2016 policy restricted the trade in 20 salamander genera in attempts to prevent Bsal introduction. However, little comprehensive data is available to eval...
Comprehensive LEMIS amphibian trade (1999-2021) dataset available at: https://zenodo.org/record/7504948#.Y-QEtOzMI6G
The exotic pet trade has largely shifted from traditional brick-and-mortar shops to online commerce. Understanding the dynamics of online pet trade, including relationships between species characteristics and a species’ relative popularity, can assist in informing trade regulation for conservation and biosecurity. Here, we identified the leading co...
The international wildlife trade presents severe conservation and environmental security risks, yet no international regulatory framework exists to monitor the trade of species not listed in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). We explored the composition and dynamics of inte...
The wildlife (animal and plant) trade has moved online, which presents researchers and enforcement agencies with an unprecedented opportunity to monitor trade activity to manage environmental biosecurity and combat illegal activities. The invasion risk posed by ecommerce was previously identified by the Environment and Invasives Committee Scoping S...
The realization that ecological principles play an important role in infectious disease dynamics has led to a renaissance in epidemiological theory. Ideas from ecological succession theory have begun to inform an understanding of the relationship between the individual microbiome and health but have not yet been applied to investigate broader, popu...
Contemporary wildlife trade is massively facilitated by the Internet. By design, the dark web is one layer of the Internet that is difficult to monitor and lacks thorough investigation. Here, we accessed a comprehensive database of dark web marketplaces to search across c. 2 million dark web advertisements over 5 years using c. 7k wildlife trade-re...
The international wildlife trade presents severe conservation and environmental security risks. However, no international regulatory framework exists to monitor the trade of species not listed in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). We explored the composition and dynamics of...
The pet trade is a major driver of both biodiversity loss and the introduction of invasive alien species. Building a comprehensive understanding of the pet trade would improve prediction of conservation and biosecurity threats, with the aim to prevent further negative impacts.
We used South Australia’s native wildlife permit reporting system as a d...
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) threatens conservation and biosecurity effort s. The Internet has greatly facilitated the trade of wildlife, and researchers have increasingly examined the Internet to uncover illegal trade. However, most effort s to locate illegal trade on the Internet are targeted to one or few taxa or products. Large-scale effort...
Illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade (IUWT) currently presents one of the most high-profile conservation challenges. There is no "one-size-fits-all" strategy, and a variety of disciplines and actors are needed for any counteractive approach to work effectively. Here, we detail common challenges faced when tackling IUWT, and we describe some avai...
Illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade (IUWT) currently presents one of the most high-profile conservation challenges. There is no "one-size-fits-all" strategy, and a variety of disciplines and actors are needed for any counteractive approach to work effectively. Here, we detail common challenges faced when tackling IUWT, and we describe some avai...
Illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade is growing at a global level, threatening the traded species and coexisting biota, and promoting the spread of invasive species. From the loss of ecosystem services to diseases transmitted from wildlife to humans, or connections with major organized crime networks and disruption of local to global economies,...
The live pet trade is a major driver of both biodiversity loss and the introduction of invasive alien species. Building a comprehensive understanding of the pet trade would improve prediction of conservation and biosecurity threats, with the aim to prevent further negative impacts. We used South Australia’s native wildlife permit reporting system a...
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) threatens conservation and biosecurity efforts. The Internet has greatly facilitated the trade of wildlife, and researchers have increasingly examined the Internet to uncover illegal trade. However, most efforts to locate illegal trade on the Internet are targeted to one or few taxa or products. Large-scale efforts...
Unsustainable wildlife trade threatens an increasing number of species globally. Australia has a particularly rich and endemic herpetofauna, which is coveted on the international pet market. While Australia implements domestic protection of most of its native species, there is little to no regulation of international trade once live animals have be...
The international trade in exotic vertebrate pets provides key social and economic benefits but also drives associated ecological, ethical, and human health impacts. However, despite its clear importance, we currently lack a full understanding of the structure of the pet trade, hampering efforts to optimize its benefits while mitigating its negativ...
There is considerable evidence that keeping propagule pressure low can drastically reduce establishment probability of potential invasive species. Yet, most management plans and research efforts fail to explicitly acknowledge all three of the components of propagule pressure: size, number, and the risk–release relationship. It is unclear how failin...
1.Automated monitoring of websites that trade wildlife is increasingly necessary to inform conservation and biosecurity efforts. However, e-commerce and wildlife trading websites can contain a vast number of advertisements, an unknown proportion of which may be irrelevant to researchers and practitioners. Given that many of these advertisements hav...
Western countries are less frequently implicated in illegal wildlife trade (IWT), contrasted with other transnational consumers, yet substantial evidence suggests that they contribute prominently. Live animal smuggling presents a suite of biosecurity concerns, including invasive species and disease risks. Here, we compared the live alien reptile sp...
Globalisation of the live pet trade facilitates major pathways for the transport and introduction of invasive alien species across longer distances and at higher frequencies than previously possible. Moreover, the unsustainable trade of species is a major driver for the over-exploitation of wild populations. Australia minimises the biosecurity and...
The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an access...
We discuss a Red Team-Blue Team (RT-BT) study conducted to examine the formation and efficacy of social networks in self-organizing, ad hoc , or crowd-sourced intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in grassroots, improvised communities. Student volunteers were sorted into two teams: one team (Blue) was asked to find puzzle pieces using cl...
The annual trade in exotic vertebrates as pets is a multi‐billion‐dollar global business. Thousands of species, and tens of millions of individual animals, are shipped both internationally and within countries to satisfy this demand. Most research on the exotic pet trade has focused on its contribution to native biodiversity loss and disease spread...
Host response to emerging pathogens is variable, causing uncertainty about population-level impacts and challenging effective disease management. White-nose syndrome (WNS) has caused catastrophic declines in some bat species, while others appear less impacted. Developing predictive models based on observed survival patterns can generate testable hy...
Predation is seen as the most important source of mortality for many endangered species, including the piping plover. However, predation can be managed through lethal methods, birth control or by excluding predators from nests. Nevertheless, managing a predator population in order to protect a threatened prey population has uncertain outcomes makin...
Mathematical models have long been used to aid in conservation decision-making, however there are many objections to their use by conservation practitioners. Two common objections are that model outputs are too uncertain and are often not communicated effectively. Population viability analysis (PVA) often makes use of mathematical models and has be...
Executive Summary
The purpose of the report is to assess the extent to which water and water-related resources in the Pinelands region are modified by land development, especially since adoption of the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan. Land development includes both urban uses (e.g., housing, commercial and industrial, utilities, public faci...
Questions
Questions (3)
I'm looking for a list of name changes or synonyms for Amphibian species. I know this type of thing exists for reptiles, mammals, and birds (http://esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E096/269/). However, I can;t find a comprehensive list for Amphibians. I know that EOL lists all synonyms on the page for the species (for example cane toad: http://eol.org/pages/333309/names/synonyms), but I have no idea how to use that to create a synonym list for ALL (or at least most) amphibian species.
Many websites say in their terms that use of anything (text, pictures, etc) on their site is prohibited because it is their intellectual property. Does anyone know if it is actually illegal or legal to web scrape data from websites to use in research? Do I need to get permission from each individual website I want to scrape? Does the data need to be "anonymous" when published (i.e. someone can't determine which website it came from)?
I am interesting in finding prevalence/incidence rates of specific opportunistic infections of young age groups (not adult) from before and after the start of the AIDS epidemic (~1980).
In particular I am looking for trends in: Tuberculosis, Cryptosporidium, and Non-Typhi Salmonella.
Does anyone know if such data exists and where I can find it? I would want to look in an area where HIV/AIDS is widespread, so somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa would be ideal (or the whole region).
