Wildlife Trade Records List 107,356 Species, Double the Last Global Estimate

At least 107,356 species are in use or in trade worldwide, roughly twice the 50,000 that IPBES, the UN biodiversity science panel, estimated in its global analysis. The count comes from Alice C. Hughes of the University of Melbourne, Neil D. Burgess of the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre and 22 co-authors, who published it on Oct. 30, 2026.

The figure counts species recorded in wildlife trade monitoring programs, not a fresh survey of the trade itself. Writing in Science Advances, the authors say that overexploitation of wildlife is one of the greatest global drivers of biodiversity loss, that data on what is extracted and traded is both incomplete and highly fragmented, and that those gaps obscure the true scale of the trade. Their own total is at least double the earlier estimate, not a final one.

Up to 47,685 of those species are animals, covering 42% of all described vertebrate species.

Most countries keep no systematic trade records for species that CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty, does not list. The one exception is the Law Enforcement Management Information System, a United States dataset that frequently held a higher diversity of species in trade than the global databases did. The authors call for national monitoring of that kind, and for a standard way of collating trade data beyond the species CITES lists.

Without those changes, the global indicators meant to guide sustainability and conservation will continue to cover less than 2% of the species in trade.