WildlifeTracer is a database maintained by the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions and was initially developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide. WildlifeTracer monitors e-commerce websites and collects data on all wildlife advertisements that are posted. This website (diwt.org) is an interface to the WildlifeTracer database. Our webscrapers have collected millions of advertisements so far. WildlifeTracer was designed to improve monitoring and enforcement of illegal wildlife trade in Australia and is available to government and university employees free-of-charge.

Each website we monitor is 'scraped' at time intervals ranging from daily to bi-weekly depending on how often advertisements are posted. We automate monitoring by using 'webscrapers' which are custom computer programs that extract attributes from advertisements such as species name, price, and location.

The data we collect depends on what is provided by the website. We try our best to extract every piece of information possible. The fields we collect include: text description, price, species name, user information, location, and picture URLs. When you search the WildlifeTracer database, all the attributes we've collected are returned to you.

WildlifeTracer was originally funded to collect online wildlife trade data for vertebrates and weeds across 4 regions, including Australia, the United States of America, Europe, and Japan.^[1]. However, we now monitor Australian websites specifically. We monitor wildlife trade of taxa occurring on these websites including birds, amphibians, reptiles, plants, fish, and invertebrates. WildlifeTracer has the capabilities to expand to new taxa and new websites in the future. Please refer to this page to see the specific websites WildlifeTracer currently monitors.

To search WildlifeTracer, simply select the "New Search" option above. Please refer to the full Guide for specific documentation.

WildlifeTracer offers a number of features designed to make searching through our database convenient.

• Set up automated email alerts based on keywords
• Narrow search to specific State of interest
• Download results in Excel sheets
• Set up search with unlimited search words
• Search any 30 day period since our records began

For improvements on current features and suggestions for new features please contact us via the Contact page or at contact@diwt.org.

Currently, WildlifeTracer is monitoring the surface web: e-commerce, pet stores, classifieds, forums, lost & founds, and adoption websites.

We are trialling methods to monitor social media (deep web) and the dark web. We hope to be able to bring social media to WildlifeTracer in the future.