Weed wide web: characterising illegal online trade of invasive plants in Australia

Abstract

Invasive plants pose ongoing threats to biodiversity and agriculture, and e-commerce platforms offer an easy pathway for their continued spread despite legal prohibitions. We collected 235,162 plant advertisements from a major Australian e-commerce website over 12 months and identified 155 plant taxa prohibited from trade in at least one Australian state or territory. Our results demonstrate that a lack of surveillance and enforcement on online marketplaces allows illegal trade in invasive plants to persist largely unchecked, and we highlight priority actions for platforms and regulators to close this gap.