About DIWT

The Digital surveillance for Illegal Wildlife Trade (DIWT) database was developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide. DIWT monitors over 80 e-commerce websites and stores all wildlife advertisements that are posted. This website (diwt.org) is an interface to the DIWT database. Currently, DIWT has collected over 6.3 million advertisements. DIWT was designed to improve monitoring and enforcement of illegal wildlife trade in Australia and is available to government and university employees.

How is data collected?

Each website we monitored is 'scraped' either once a day or once a week depending on how often advertisements are posted. We automated monitoring by using 'web scrapers' which are custom computer code we wrote to extract attributes from advertisements such as text, price, and location.

What kind of data is collected?

The data we collect depends on what is provided by the website. We try our best to extract every piece of information possible. The fields we collect include: text description, price, species name, user information, location, and picture URLs. When you search the DIWT database, all the attributes we've collected are returned to you.

Which websites and taxa are monitored?

DIWT was originally funded to collect online wildlife trade data for vertebrates and weeds. We systematically[1] chose the most popular wildlife e-commerce websites in 4 regions. There is some wildlife trade of other taxa occurring on these websites (i.e., pet invertebrates). DIWT has the capabilities to expand to new taxa and new websites in the future. Please refer to this page to see the specific websites DIWT currently monitors.

To search DIWT, simply select the "New Search" option above. Please refer to the full Guide for specific documentation.

What are the key advantages of DIWT?

DIWT offers a number of features designed to make searching through our database convenient.

  • Set up automated email alerts based on keywords
  • Narrow search to specific State of interest
  • Download results in Excel sheet
  • Set up search with unlimited search words
  • Search any 30 day period since our records began

For improvements on current features and suggestions for new features please contact us via the Contact page or at contact@diwt.org.

What about social media sites?

Currently, DIWT is monitoring the surface web: e-commerce, pet stores, classifieds, forums, lost & founds, and adoption websites.

The 3 layers of the Internet.

We are trialling methods to monitor social media (deep web) and the dark web. We hope to be able to bring social media to DIWT in the future.