FloraGuard: tackling the online illegal trade in endangered plants through a cross-disciplinary ICT-enabled methodology

This article presents a part of the ongoing Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project “FloraGuard: Tackling the illegal trade in endangered plants” that relies on cross-disciplinary approaches to analyze online marketplaces for the illegal trade in endangered plants, and explores strategies to develop digital resources to assist law enforcement in countering and disrupting this criminal market. This contribution focuses on how the project brought together computer science, criminology, conservation science, and law enforcement expertise to create a tool for the automatic gathering of relevant online information to be used for research, intelligence, and investigative purposes. The article also discusses the ethical standards applied and proposes the concept of “artificial intelligence (AI) review” to provide a sociotechnical solution that builds trustworthiness in the AI approaches used for this type of cross-disciplinary information and communications technology (ICT)-enabled methodology.