Internet Trade of Aquatic Invasive Species

About the Internet Trade of Aquatic Invasive Species

Limited work has been done to assess the threat posed by the online availability and sale of live organisms despite it being recognized as an important and growing pathway for invasive species. The Great Lakes Detector of Invasive Aquatics in Trade (GLDIATR) is an innovative approach developed by the Great Lakes Commission that uses advanced technology to search the internet for sites where aquatic invasive species can be purchased and shipped to the Great Lakes region. This information can be used by invasive species managers to inform and help target a variety of activities including outreach and education, risk assessment, monitoring and surveillance, and enforcement.

The GLDIATR project helps resource managers identify, evaluate, prevent and minimize the risk that species will be imported into the Great Lakes region through online sales. By automatically identifying sales pages, GLDIATR simplifies the process for removing these invasive species from trade. This software enables managers to quickly identify sellers with regulated species offered for sale and notify those sellers to remove those regulated species from their inventory. The GLC is continuing to enhance and expand this work, including targeting sales of high risk invasive species, coordinating outreach, and developing customized data reports for each Great Lakes state and province.

Both a patchwork of regulations on species and the growing global online marketplace can make it difficult to find and prevent sales of restricted species. To address this threat, the Great Lakes Commission (GLC) developed innovative software that searches the web for sites where aquatic invasive species can be purchased and shipped to the Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes Detector of Invasive Aquatics in Trade – or GLDIATR – shields against invasive species by employing advanced technology like natural language processing and machine intelligence to scrape, sort and collect thousands of pages across the internet, focusing on keywords including both the scientific and common names of species across auction sites and search engines. This technology is a feasible, and potentially cost-effective, option for tracking the online sale of priority AIS and can be used to inform the activities of AIS researchers, outreach coordinators, managers, and law enforcement officials.

 

 

Funding

This project is supported with funding through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

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