Organized crime networks trading wildlife worldwide continue to pose a serious concern for the international community. According to the UN World Wildlife Crime Report 2024, among around 4000 specifically affected animals and plants, the most demanded are rhinoceros (29%), pangolins (28%), and elephants (15%), along with cedars (47%), rosewood (35%), agarwood, and other myrtales (13%) among the other species. While it is acknowledged that progress has been made in limiting the international trade in endangered species over time, illicit wildlife trade is still largely persistent. Currently, “there are 124 jurisdictions associated with globally-linked seizures” of animals, with India being the “highest number of wildlife product seizures between 2013 and 2025,” as the Wildlife Seizure Dashboard suggests.

The scale of the damage posed by illegal wildlife trafficking is enormous, given the difficulty in detecting the real volume and turnover of the species trade. Complicating this matter, past research has indicated that the Internet has facilitated illicit trade in biodiversity. That is, “once concentrated in physical markets, much of this activity has moved online,” making it even harder to track the wildlife trade now that has moved to e-commerce relative to wildlife trade outside of the internet. This difficulty in detecting environmental crimes, combined with increasingly lucrative markets for the illicit trade in biological species, which generate approximately $20 billion in annual profits stimulate various forms of crime to grow. Therefore, the question of the effectiveness of global efforts to protect endangered animals and plants remains relevant.

Considering the scale of this problem, one of the most important existing international institutional frameworks regulating interstate cooperation in illicit wildlife trade remains the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The CITES was adopted in 1975 and now includes 185 participating countries, named as Parties to the Convention. Every two to three years, Parties convene under the Convention’s governing body, namely Conferences of the Parties (CoPs), where they review the implementation of the Convention and discuss ongoing challenges on the way toward the progress of CITES goals.

Alongside Parties, these CoPs are increasingly attended by additional stakeholders such as nation-states that are not Parties, NGOs, UN agencies, and representatives of other international conventions. While there have been 20 CoPs to date, some scholars criticize CoPs for their ineffectiveness in solving conservation issues. This is combined with a more general critique of CITES structure, which, due to the voluntary commitment on the side of Parties and weak regulations for the Convention’s implementation, does not produce desirable results. Yet, despite these critiques, scholarship on the CITES effectiveness is missing another vital point that could supplement our understanding of broader Convention’s effect. That is attention should be placed on systematically examining the actors involved in CITES CoPs, on whom the primary decision-making depends at the national level.

To this end, we provide researchers with a new set of resources to begin to address this challenge via a novel dataset on COP attendees. More specifically, in our recently published article in Scientific Data titled ‘Geo-located attendance data for CITES Conferences of the Parties,’ we outline a unique description of the dataset that we designed for all CITES CoPs to date. Our dataset contains observations pertaining to the individual participants who attended a particular CoP, spanning all 20 CoPs to date. At this individual attendee-level of observation, we then recover and construct data on CoP meeting details, delegation name and status, attendee name, honorific, gender, and affiliation, similar to our earlier dataset for UNFCCC CoPs. Additionally, and where available, we provide geolocations for both attendees (based upon the provided affiliation address) and CoPs, which is an additional novel contribution, allowing for the conduct of spatial(temporal) analysis by interested scholars.

The individual-level dataset introduced in the CITES article mentioned above, therefore, provides the first complete view of who attended CITES CoPs. This data will facilitate new research into CITES’ effectiveness through a novel, unexamined actor-level angle. While at the same time refocusing the discussion away from the well-studied Convention’s pitfalls. Such data will particularly allow scholars to understand the patterns of participation and explore the consequences of uneven representation within the CITES framework, therefore, enhancing our understanding of whose interests are represented more or less.

More specifically, the data will allow scholars to learn more about the size of the delegations, composition, and differences in properties of the delegations among the developed and developing countries. In addition, it will help to learn about the extent of civil society engagement over time, suggesting how its involvement affected CITES effectiveness. Scholars interested in network analysis will be able to use data to map connections between governments, NGOs, and scientific institutions, allowing them to identify central actors or brokers in conservation diplomacy. Finally, this dataset can broadly suggest new evidence for problems of representation and equity or influence and advocacy, making it uniquely useful for both scholars and practitioners.

As wildlife trafficking takes new forms, we hope that our attendee-level data will enable researchers to learn more about how participation in international negotiations within CITES changes over time, revealing patterns of engagement affecting international decision-making that in turn influence national implementation standards.