WildTrace v1.6.2: the 2-minute video guide

Added

• A 2-minute video guide (Tour menu, the welcome card, About, or #guide in the address).
  It is a real recording of the live Atlas, not generated footage, and it answers three research
  questions: where the pangolin evidence in India comes from, where seized red sanders goes, and
  where animal-borne outbreaks and trafficking overlap. It also shows Investigate, Analysis and the
  tours. Captions are burned into the picture and also provided as a text track. To regenerate it,
  run scripts/make_guide.py, which writes web/media/guide.mp4, .jpg and .vtt.

Watch it: https://tarunv13.github.io/wildtrace/#guide

Data files attached as before: cases (CC BY 4.0), CITES flows (CITES terms, non-commercial), zoonoses (ODbL).

WildTrace v1.6.1: satellite view, markets beyond the US

Added

• Satellite view. A map button switches to EOxCloudless 2024 imagery (Copernicus Sentinel-2,
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, credited on the map), so forests, deserts, mountains and coasts can be read.
  Place names turn white on a dark halo over imagery. The choice is remembered; nothing loads from
  EOX unless it is switched on.

Changed

• Flows spreads routes across markets by default: the busiest routes, but at most two into any
  one country. The default view went from 12 of 14 routes ending in the United States (an artefact of
  how completely it reports seizures) to routes into ten markets across Asia, the Gulf, Europe and
  North America. Switch it off for the raw ranking; it is kept in the link.
• The rotate button and the idle spin are gone: the spin stopped at the first touch and did nothing
  outside Cases, so the button looked broken.
• Deeper water on the map, so land and sea separate at a glance.
• The two routes named in news reports are no longer drawn on the opening map, where "Routes 2"
  suggested wildlife moves along two routes. The legend now links to Flows (15,000+ seized
  shipments reported to CITES); the news routes remain an evidence layer there.

Open data in this release

• cases.csv (CC BY 4.0); cites_seized_flows.csv and cites_declared_flows.csv (CITES Trade Database terms: non-commercial, with attribution); zoonotic_outbreak_reports.csv; species_viruses.csv (VIRION, ODbL 1.0)

Live: https://tarunv13.github.io/wildtrace/

WildTrace v1.6.0: evidence, icons, flags and tours

Added

• Evidence behind every route. Each Flows route has an Evidence button, and clicking a line on
  the map opens the same page: what was seized (species and products such as ivory carvings, skins,
  timber or live animals), the years, which country reported it, the declared purpose, any transit
  countries, a plain answer to "where is the article?" (CITES records are government reports, not
  news, and are anonymised shipment by shipment) with a link to check the CITES Trade Database, and
  the WildTrace news cases involving the same species in those countries, with their outlets.
• Icons and logos throughout. Species silhouettes from PhyloPic (public domain, CC0 or CC BY,
  credited on each species page) for 37 of 38 groups; product and case-kind icons from Tabler Icons
  (MIT); case kinds as glyphs inside the map points; outlet logos beside every source (570 outlets)
  and organisation logos on the Network cards. Logos are fetched once at build time and served from
  the site, so a reader's browser never contacts a third party for them.
• web/data/flows_detail.json: per-route taxa, products, years, reporters, purposes and transit.
• Country flags wherever a country is named: country pages, case chips, Pulse, search, Flows
  routes and pickers, the route evidence page, the heatmap, the Zoonoses and Analysis lists
  (flag-icons, MIT, self-hosted).
• Tours for every section. The main tour now covers the three modes and every menu, with a
  full Investigate step and buttons that jump straight into the Flows or Investigate tours. Flows,
  Zoonoses, Investigate, its import tab, Analysis, the heatmap, Network, Table and Methods each have
  a short tour that runs the first time they open. Every card has a "Don't show section tips"
  switch, and the Tour button opens a menu: full tour, tour this section, tips on or off, reset.
• Pulse links straight into Investigate.

Changed

• The timeline is drawn at the dock's real size (it was stretched), with years marking January and
  month labels thinned on narrow screens; it redraws when the dock resizes.
• The map-layer switches (cases, routes, observatories, your data) moved from the top bar into the
  legend beside the map, so the top bar fits every desktop width and Investigate is never cut off.

Open data in this release

• cases.csv: 1,285 cases (CC BY 4.0)
• cites_seized_flows.csv, cites_declared_flows.csv: CITES flows by species group (CITES Trade Database terms: non-commercial, with attribution)
• zoonotic_outbreak_reports.csv: WHO Disease Outbreak News reports by disease, pathway and country
• species_viruses.csv: viruses confirmed per traded species group (VIRION, ODbL 1.0)

Live: https://tarunv13.github.io/wildtrace/

WildTrace v1.5.0: Flows and Zoonoses

Added

• Cases · Flows · Zoonoses. The Atlas now answers three questions on the same map, switched
  from the top bar. Each mode brings its own left panel, and Flows and Zoonoses switch to the flat
  map so both ends of a route are in view.
• Flows: supply, transit and demand. 15,512 seized shipments reported to CITES since 2015
  (source code I, CITES Trade Database 2026.1), drawn from where a specimen was taken to where it
  was seized. The reader builds the view: follow a species or a country, pick source and market
  countries, the number of routes and the evidence (seized, declared legal trade, routes named in
  cases), and colour lines by region (eight UN M49 regions, colour-blind-safe palette), role
  (source, transit hub, market) or species. Lines shade from the source region's colour to the
  market's, arrowheads and moving dashes show direction, and a glow under each market grows with
  what arrives. Every route is a checkbox; a story sentence is written from what is on; the whole
  view is kept in the link.
• Who supplies whom: a source × market heatmap by country or region, plants, animals or both,
  with or without the United States. Clicking a cell draws that route.
• Zoonoses: 2,116 WHO Disease Outbreak News reports of diseases with an animal reservoir,
  grouped by how they reach people (wildlife contact, birds, livestock, insects and ticks), with
  WildTrace cases overlaid; a "countries with both" list; and a table of the viruses confirmed by
  sequencing or isolation in each traded species group (VIRION), same species as in people and
  close relatives, by virus family. Literature notes found with Consensus (Gippet et al. 2026,
  Shivaprakash et al. 2021, Lee et al. 2020, Gibb et al. 2024).
• Analysis sheet: cases per month, events, species, source or market, transport and CITES
  seizures per year, each with what it can and cannot show.
• Species records show a Sankey of seized shipments (taken from, shipped from, seized in) and the
  species' viruses; country records show a source / transit / market bar and outbreak counts.
• Species pages for groups the news rarely covers (orchids, cacti, cycads and others) now exist,
  built from their CITES seizure records.
• wildtrace cites now covers every country (it was limited to South and Southeast Asia) and
  wildtrace zoonoses refreshes VIRION and WHO data weekly in CI.

Open data in this release

• cases.csv: 1,271 cases (CC BY 4.0)
• cites_seized_flows.csv, cites_declared_flows.csv: CITES flows by species group (CITES Trade Database terms: non-commercial, with attribution)
• zoonotic_outbreak_reports.csv: 2,116 WHO Disease Outbreak News reports by disease, pathway and country
• species_viruses.csv: viruses confirmed per traded species group (VIRION, ODbL 1.0)

Live: https://tarunv13.github.io/wildtrace/?mode=flows

WildTrace v1.2.1

This release is archived on Zenodo for citation (same content as v1.2.0).

WildTrace is an open-source map of the global illegal wildlife trade in fauna and flora. This first archived release covers 1,251 cases in 59 countries, built from 1,752 public reports dated January 2024 to September 2026.

What's in it

• Evidence grading. Every case is marked validated, official (a government, enforcement or judicial source), corroborated (two or more independent outlets) or single report. A "Report a correction" link opens a pre-filled issue.
• Official sources first. Releases from 25 government, enforcement and judicial domains worldwide, plus a 12-month history backfill.
• Open data. web/data/cases.csv and the JSON behind the map, CC BY 4.0. Code MIT.
• The Atlas. A globe with a density glow, reported routes, observatories, a timeline, a sortable case table and an About panel.
• Investigate. A link-analysis workbench in the browser. Your own CSV, Excel or JSON stays on your machine.
• Privacy. No person accused is ever named, and the build fails if a name, phone number or seller identity gets through.

Known limits: 924 of the 1,251 cases rest on a single report, and 557 name no place. Counts show where wildlife crime is reported, not where it happens.

Cite: Verma, T. (2026). WildTrace: the open atlas of illegal wildlife trade (v1.2.1). Zenodo.