ISN2: Detecting and Interdicting Illicit Wildlife Trafficking Supply Chains

该奖项通过研究非法野生动物供应链对政策、执法和市场干预的反应和反应，促进经济福利和跨学科科学的进步。据估计，野生动物贩运每年为全球犯罪经济带来230亿美元的收入；它可以破坏国家安全，减少经济繁荣，并加剧美国和国外的社会冲突。这个项目建立了对不同计算方法如何帮助检测非法野生动物供应链中的网络模式的方法的基本见解，并对非法野生动物供应链组织如何运作(甚至有时使用法律网络)有了新的理解。这项研究将为资源分配、监测和执法以及沟通提供信息，以促进有效的阻止活动，打击野生动物贩运。此外，该裁决将有利于关于如何、何时以及在哪里干预和破坏非法野生动物供应网络的决定。这种跨学科的方法在地理学、供应链管理、运筹学、保护社会科学和计算机科学之间创造了新的交流渠道。该项目支持博士生广泛参与跨学科科学，将通过出版物将成果传播到研究期刊上，通过商业案例研究传播大学教育，通过从业者参与保护实践。该项目利用对全球野生动物贩运问题的补充调查路线，对野生动物贩运供应链(WTSC)有了新的、基本的理解，包括决策点、参与者的行为模式、组成部分之间的动态联系以及与合法供应链的融合。这项研究将使用从非法WTSC收集的现有团队数据来定义、描述和绘制特定供应链的关键节点和组件，创建与WTSC决策相关的定性框架模型，开发方法来检测WTSC中有意义的弱点和弹性模式，并基于网络设计优化、多臂土匪、定向运动问题和绿色安全博弈等技术创建新的WTSC阻断定量模型和解决方案。我们的成果将是衡量真实世界系统中的操作，开发关于系统操作的地理空间信息科学和计算模型，改进和修订这些模型以预测弹性，并测试模型的可扩展性、战术和战略层面的性能以及与其他非法供应链的融合。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award promotes economic welfare and progress of interdisciplinary science, by studying how illegal wildlife supply chains react and respond to policy, law enforcement, and market interventions. Wildlife trafficking generates an estimated US$23 billion annually for the global criminal economy; it can undermine national security, decrease economic prosperity, and fuel social conflict both in the U.S. and abroad. This project builds fundamental insight about how different computational approaches aid methods for detecting network patterns in illicit wildlife supply chains and new understanding about how illicit wildlife supply chain organizations operate (even using legal networks at times). The study will inform resource allocation, monitoring and enforcement, and communication to facilitate effective interdiction activities to combat wildlife trafficking. Further, the award will benefit decisions about how, when, and where to intervene and disrupt illicit wildlife supply networks. The interdisciplinary approach creates new channels of communication between geography, supply chain management, operations research, conservation social science, and computer science. The project supports broad engagement of PhD students in interdisciplinary science, will diffuse results into research journals via publications, university education via business case studies, and conservation practice via engagement of practitioners. Using complementary lines of inquiry into the global problem of wildlife trafficking, the project develops a new, fundamental understanding of wildlife trafficking supply chains (WTSCs), including decision points, behavioral patterns of participants, dynamic linkages between component parts, and convergence with legal supply chains. The research will define, describe, and map key nodes and components of a specific supply chain using existing, team-collected data from an illicit WTSC, create qualitative framework models associated with decisions about WTSCs, develop methods to detect meaningful patterns of weakness and resilience in WTSCs, and create new quantitative WTSC interdiction models and solution approaches building on techniques for network design optimization, the multi-armed bandit, the orienteering problem and green security games. Our outcomes will be to measure operations in a real-world system, develop geospatial information science and computational models about system operations, refine and revise these models to predict resiliency, and test the scalability, performance of the models at tactical and strategic levels and convergence with other illicit supply chains. Results have potentially transformative implications for science and decision-making in broader society.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.