Patents can help us understand wildlife trade trends, new study shows

Patents for wildlife product alternatives, such as farmed or synthetic pangolin products, may also be indicative of a shift away from a trade in wild specimens of species. Dr Amy Hinsley, Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Wildlife Trade at the University of Oxford, and joint lead author of the paper, said:‘Our findings show that the wildlife trade is like any other commercial trade, with businesses constantly innovating to develop new products or methods to produce them. For example, there was a spike in patents for medicinal rhino products over March 2008, coinciding with that year’s significant increase in poaching. Our novel study suggests that regulatory measures such as commercial trade bans do not mean the end of trade in particular species and their derivatives. The study ‘Early warning of trends in commercial wildlife trade through novel machine-learning analysis of patent filing’ has been published in Nature Communications.