Via Wired: “The international black market in wildlife—alive or dead—is notoriously difficult to track. Hunters and smugglers don’t report their take for the same reasons that drug dealers don’t report profits to the IRS. But if you could actually track those networks, maybe you could do something about them. That’s what sent Nikkita Patel, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to an unusual source of data on the illegal wildlife trade: the news. The news reports are typically gruesome: a frozen tiger carcass found in a truck in Vietnam, or a dead rhino lying in a wildlife sanctuary with its horn hacked off. But the overall news is even worse. Fueled by appetites for ivory jewelry and traditional medicine practices that use rhino horn and tiger bone, the trade in protected animals has driven multiple species to extinction—or close to it. The western black rhino disappeared entirely in 2011. African elephant populations have dwindled by over 80 percent, and their Asian counterparts by more than 50 percent since the early 20th century. Numbers of tigers, poached for both medicine and jewelry, have dropped 97 percent in less than a century. But without knowing exactly what’s going on, wildlife agencies and researchers can’t stop these killings. So Patel turned to HealthMap, a tool the Boston Children’s Hospital created 10 years ago. The tool searches multilingual news aggregators and forums for media reports, parsing them for relevant keywords. It was already tuned to the wildlife trade, in part because animals can be vectors for disease spread. HealthMap records the key information in each article, such as the location of the reported illegal transaction, and keeps a tally of the number of individuals from each species traded. Patel’s research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies more on that data than previous illegal wildlife trade work. “It’s looking at who the key players are,” Patel says, “and how to best break down trade networks…”