The Importance of an Interdisciplinary Research Approach to Inform Wildlife Trade Management in Southeast Asia

Wildlife trade represents a major threat to endangered-species populations, especially in Southeast Asia, where trade continues at high levels despite increased efforts to control illegal activities. To identify management strategies that better mitigate the threat of this trade, research must address knowledge gaps about the complexity of established trade networks. This requires a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach that integrates biological, anthropological, socioeconomic, and other kinds of data and involves multiple stakeholders across sectors. We present here an interdisciplinary research framework for developing such an approach. Our integrative framework, based on the social–ecological systems framework by Ostrom, can be used to explore and untangle complex wildlife trade dynamics across scales and test hypotheses derived from different disciplines to provide robust recommendations for trade management. We also discuss the need for developing databases for trade-targeted species and outline steps to build and strengthen technical and interdisciplinary capacity to support the integrative framework.