Statisticians help fight against increasing illegal ivory trade

With elephant poaching levels the worst they have been in a decade, and recorded ivory seizures at their highest levels since 1989, the revised system will give accurate and up-to-date information on the illegal trade of ivory. This will be of huge benefit for international and national policy makers on elephant conservation and on illicit trade who have previously struggled to get reliable and timely data.

At the heart of the upgrade is an innovative new database that allows countries to report seizures of illegal ivory online, making data entry easier and more accurate than ever before.  It will also encourage more countries to report illegal ivory trade as they will be able to access statistical summaries of their data and review other seizures where their country is implicated.

TRAFFIC manages ETIS on behalf of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). It is one of two elephant monitoring systems under CITES, the other being the Monitoring Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) system.

The revised online ETIS will be showcased today at the CITES Standing Committee currently taking place in Geneva. In attendance will be representatives from many of the CITES Parties who will use the revised system. They will witness the functionality and the effectiveness of the database by way of a demonstration, ahead of its launch in September 2012.

Bob Burn and Dr Fiona Underwood, statisticians from the University's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, have worked closely with TRAFFIC to develop the revised ETIS.

Dr Underwood, project leader, said: "We are very pleased that we are able to provide a solid statistical foundation to ETIS to ensure that it provides high quality and timely information on the illegal ivory trade at a crucial time for elephants."

Recording illegal ivory seizures is just one aspect of the revised monitoring system, which now has enhanced capability to provide indicators of hidden illegal activity.

Applied Statistics Research Fellow Bob Burn, who conceived the current project and has been involved with ETIS since its inception in 1997, said: "Not all illegal ivory transactions are discovered or officially reported.  The challenge in analysing seizures data is to adjust for this gap by accounting for factors such as law enforcement effort and corruption. Using cutting edge statistical methods the monitoring system can now begin to combat this problem."

The statistical analyses will provide information on how patterns of illegal trade are changing over time and will identify problem countries so that attention can be focused upon those countries most heavily implicated in illicit trade. This provides crucial evidence for CITES and individual governments in their decision making when it comes to elephant conservation.

The work was carried out under a Darwin Initiative project, led by the University of Reading, funded by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

UK Environment Minister Richard Benyon said: "These magnificent creatures are suffering horrific deaths at the hands of poachers, and if we don't act now they may not have a future. This database, funded by Defra's Darwin Initiative, will accurately record illegal ivory seizures so we get a real picture of what is happening on the ground. This information can be shared around the world to help stop the illegal trade in ivory and put poachers out of business."

TRAFFIC's Tom Milliken, who manges ETIS, added: "Since 1997, our long-term collaboration with Bob Burn and Dr Fiona Underwood from the University of Reading has progressively scaled up the science behind ETIS and made it a ‘best practice', state-of-the-art monitoring tool for the global conservation community.  TRAFFIC, but also elephants, trumpet their appreciation to Bob and Fiona and the Darwin Initiative! "

The database was developed in collaboration with Solertium Corporation, USA.