Wildlife Trade

Millions of animals, plants, and wildlife products are moved across the globe every year, through both legal markets and illegal smuggling. This trade presents serious conservation and biosecurity threats — removing animals from the wild can endanger populations, and moving them elsewhere can spread disease or create new invasive species. My research quantifies the scale and dynamics of the live wildlife trade, from global import data and online marketplaces to smuggling networks and international policy, to identify the species, pathways, and regulatory gaps that pose the greatest conservation and biosecurity risk.

The Internet

The Internet is a vast source of data on the wildlife trade, spanning e-commerce sites, classifieds, social media, and the dark web. Data collected online can inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement efforts, yet this approach remains underused. I develop methods to collect and analyze this data at scale, including a working guide for using the Internet to quantify wildlife trade, natural language processing tools to automatically classify online listings, and large-scale e-commerce surveys spanning wildlife and invasive plants, to help researchers and regulators monitor trade that would otherwise go undetected.

Biological Invasions & Biosecurity

Invasive species cause ecological and economic damage, and can even endanger human health. Biological invasions unfold in discrete stages, and my research focuses on the earliest of these: transport, introduction, and establishment. I explore the consequences of the wildlife and plant trade as a pathway for new invasive species, asking what makes certain species more common in trade, why some exotic pets are released into the environment over others, and how regulatory gaps let invasive plants and pests slip through. I also develop tools to manage this risk directly, from theoretical models of propagule pressure to environmental DNA methods for early detection of invasive insects and pathogens before they establish.

Wildlife Conservation

Wildlife populations face numerous threats to their existence including habitat destruction, climate change, poaching, and invasive species. I study the consequences of wildlife trade on wildlife persistance. I use quantitative population models to determine the extinction fate of populations under different management scenarios, and apply environmental DNA methods to monitor biodiversity in threatened ecosystems.