Wildlife trade can provide commercial incentives to conserve biodiversity but, if unsustainable, can also pose a threat. CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) aims to ensure international trade in CITES-listed species is sustainable, legal and traceable. However, large-scale temporal and spatial patterns in wildlife trade are poorly known. We address this by analysing the CITES Trade Database: >16 million shipment records for 28,282 species, from 1975 and 2014. Over this period, the volume of reported trade in CITES-listed wildlife quadrupled, from 25 million whole-organism equivalents per year to 100 million, and the ratio of wild- to captive-sourced trade in mammals, birds, reptiles, invertebrates and plants declined by an order of magnitude or more. Our findings start to reveal the scale of the legal wildlife trade, shifting trade routes and sources over time and we describe testable hypotheses for the causes of these changes.

野生动物贸易可以提供商业动机来保护生物多样性，但如果不可持续，也可能构成威胁。CITES（濒危野生动植物种国际贸易公约）旨在确保CITES所列物种的国际贸易是可持续的，合法的和可追溯的。但是，野生动植物贸易中的大规模时空格局知之甚少。我们通过分析《濒危野生动植物种国际贸易公约》的贸易数据库来解决这一问题：从1975年到2014年，有28,282个物种的1600万多笔货运记录。在此期间，《濒危野生动植物种国际贸易公约》所列野生生物的报告贸易量增长了三倍，从每年的2500万全生物当量1亿，哺乳动物，鸟类，爬行动物，无脊椎动物和植物的野生资源与圈养资源的贸易比例下降了一个数量级或更多。