Monitoring Wildlife Trafficking Online Guidelines for Conservationists

Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) has increasingly shifted to online platforms, creating new challenges for conservationists. Traffickers exploit social media, e-commerce sites, and other digital forums to reach global markets with anonymity and speed​. This guide provides conservation practitioners with a comprehensive overview of methodologies to monitor online IWT, distilled from the analysis of 30 recent studies and real-world case examples. We outline both manual and automated monitoring approaches, discuss common challenges (ethical, legal, technical, and resource-related) and propose solutions, and identify gaps where capacity building and innovation are needed.