1. CITES Under the Lens of the IUCN Red List
Lionel Jouvet(1), A. Rita Silva(1), Johanna Stärk(1), Chris Shepherd(2) and Dalia A. Conde(1, 3)
(1)University of Southern Denmark, Department of Biology, Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging
(2)TRAFFIC South East Asia, Department of Biology, Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging
(3)Species 360, Global information serving conservation, Minnesota
IUCN red list in CITES annexes
Introduction
The illegal international wildlife trade is a major threat to biodiversity by directly diminishing populations numbers. Additional threats are the potential introduction of invasive species and the spread of diseases, either due to intentional or accidental releases of confiscated animals. The international illegal trade it is estimated to be of 8 to 10 billion US Dollars per year. CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) was established as a mechanism to provide regulatory measured to ensure the sustainable international trade of species. The listing of species under CITES is mainly based on the species extinction risk, on which export quotas are determined. Here we analyzed which species listed in CITES overlap with those listed as threated by human extraction under the IUCN Red List.
Figure 2: Distribution in cites annexes of the species at the union of CITES and IUCN red list (threats by international trade)
Subsets of CITES(1) and IUCN(2) databases were collected from their official website. Only the Aves, Reptilian, Amphibian and Mammalians classes were recovered. The species names have been normalized in reference to the Catalogue Of Life database using the R package Taxize(3).
A R script developed allowed the scrap for international trade in the threads statements.
Ref: (1) CITES: (
(2) IUCN red list: (
(3) Taxize version (
Method
The Venn diagrams present the overlap of the CITES data-base with the subset of IUCN red list threatened by international trade.
Figure 1: Venn Diagrams of overlap of the data-bases of CITES and IUCN red list (threats by international trade)
Comparison of CITES and IUCN
Conclusion
We found that only between 6-8% of the species in CITES overlap with those listed as threatened by trade by the IUCN Red List.
TRAFFIC (the wildlife trade monitoring program from WWF), has documented limitations of ecological and demographical knowledge for many species to set up exporting of quotas. Our data supports this claim, since we found that for the majority of the species listed in CITES, there is not enough data to estimate generation length.
We argue that the available legislative frameworks can be significantly strengthened by developing communications techniques between databases, which can flag CITES and IUCN Specialist Groups (SSC) of possible important overlaps to consider.
With the connection to animal life history databases, and experts from the SSC, it will be possible to obtain better data to estimate quotas. These will certainly promote a closer collaboration between the IUCN and CITES. This will ensure a better listing of species in the Red List and CITES annexes.