An Exploration of Legal and Illegal Wildlife Trade into the USA
The United States of America (USA) is the largest consumer of internationally legally traded wildlife in the world. A proportion of this trade consists of species, products and parts listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which are recorded in the CITES Trade Database. Using this database, we quantified wildlife entering the USA from major exporting countries and political regions, as well as the most traded wildlife products and taxonomic groups. The trends in legal trade, and seizures of illegally traded items, over time were also examined for 21 taxonomic groups, and the relationships between legal trade and seizures were tested against four national measures of biodiversity. We found that: 1) there seems to be a overall relationship between legal and illegal trade flows; 2) Asia was the main region exporting CITES-listed wildlife products and parts to the USA between 1979 and 2013; 3) some taxonomic groups are traded more frequently for consumption while others are more frequently traded as pets or fashion items: 4) bears, crocodilians and the group 'other mammals' (mammals that do not fall into Ursidae, Felidae, Cetacea, Proboscidea, Primates or Rhinocerotidae) increased in both legal trade and seizures from 1980 to 2013; 5) both seizures and legally traded items from felines and elephants have significantly decreased through time; 6) volumes of legally traded species and seizures are correlated with four attributes of exporting countries: species endemism, species richness, number of IUCN threatened species and country size. One of the challenges facing analyses documenting legal and illegal trade in CITES-listed species is the variation in reporting efficiency and enforcement over time; this is minimised here because we only use import and seizure data from one country – the United States – which has maintained a similar enforcement system over time. We therefore provide a broadly comprehensive analysis of wildlife imports into the USA in a form that can be used ...