Botanical Black Market

Invasive plant trade

• sounds a bit like a botanical black market
• people around the world are buying and selling invasive plant species every day on online auction platforms like Ebay
• there are far too many invasive species all around the world for me to list here, but feel free to search this global database
• in order to get a scope of how much online plant trading is actually going on, researchers devised a software program to monitor where and when certain plant species were put up for sale
• the only hitch in this plan is that this program was only able to search by scientific name, so plants sold under common names went undetected
• they were also unable to determine where the plants were going after they were purchased, as that information is kept private by the auction platforms
• even so, the results they got were shocking
• over the short, 50 day monitoring period, 2,625 different plant species were auctioned off
• and 35 of those species are on the IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature) top 100 list of most invasive species
• plant sellers were located in 65 countries and invasive species were being sold by 55 of them

Thanks to the internet, we can now, with a single click, transport invasive plants across the world. The only way to monitor this is to continue keeping tabs on online trade and attempting to put restrictions on what species are bought and sold, but that will be difficult, considering the sheer size and scope of the internet’s reaches.

How will we end invasive transport?

Journal Reference:

1. Franziska Humair, Luc Humair, Fabian Kuhn, Christoph Kueffer. E-commerce trade in invasive plants. Conservation Biology, 2015; DOI:10.1111/cobi.12579