This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For decades, wildlife traffickers have illegally captured and sold hundreds of thousands of wild parrots native to Mexico. Despite changes to international wildlife laws, the conservation status of these birds has continued to deteriorate over the past 30 years.
One of the primary drivers of their extinction risk is poaching. Now, law enforcement officials have a new tool to help stop poachers in their tracks. Researchers have developed an interactive platform that allows credentialed law enforcement officers to identify future trafficking hotspots.
Arizona State University scientists, along with colleagues from the Australian National University, have mapped the hidden routes used to traffic wild parrots across Mexico, revealing where criminal networks are most likely to strike next. In new research led by ANU and co-authored by ASU scientists, researchers combine landscape ecology with criminology to reveal how illegal wildlife trafficking has evolved over the past three decades. By doing so, they were able to transform decades of confiscation data into an interactive tool.
Greg Asner, co-author and director of the ASU Center for Global Discovery and Conservation in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, said the tool could help law enforcement officials intervene before trafficked animals are sent to a final destination. "This tool allows authorities to shift from a reactive posture to proactive intervention," said Asner. "By anticipating criminal behavior and pinpointing transit bottlenecks, law enforcement can strategically deploy resources to intercept traffickers before the animals reach urban markets." The researchers examined more than 6,000 parrot confiscation records between 1997 and 2024.
Their analysis allowed them to determine how trafficking networks changed after major policy shifts, including a 2008 ban in Mexico on capturing and trading native parrots, and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The team found that half of Mexico's 20 native parrot species analyzed are directly threatened by trapping for the illegal wildlife trade, and since 1993, no Mexican parrot species has improved its conservation status. With the country's parrots now facing substantially higher extinction risk than birds globally, illegal trapping has emerged as one of the most widespread and highest-impact threats, challenging even habitat loss from agriculture and logging.
The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To visualize how parrots are moved from forests into city markets, the research team adapted a modeling tool typically used to study wildlife movement across landscapes. They modeled the entire country as an electrical grid, where wild parrot populations acted as electricity sources and confiscation locations served as endpoints.
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