International commercial trade in wildlife, whether legal or illegal, is one of the greatest threats to multiple species of wildlife today. Opinions on how to address it are deeply divided across the conservation community. Approaches fall into two broad categories: making the trade illegal to protect against any form of commercial trade or allowing some or all of the trade to be legal and seeking to manage it through sustainable trade. The conservation community is often deeply polarized on which is the better option. We posit that a way to choose between these options is by considering species-specific attributes of biological productivity, management context, and demand. We develop a conceptual framework to assess which option is more likely to result in successful conservation of a species. We show how to construct a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) to model how these attributes (1) interact to affect the sustainability of the species’ population and (2) vary under different trade management regimes. This approach can support scientifically based decision-making, by predicting the likely sustainability outcome for a population of a species under different trade management regimes, given its particular characteristics and context. The BBN allows identification of key points at which conservation interventions could change the potential outcome. It also provides the opportunity to explore how different assumptions about how humans might respond to different trade regimes affects outcomes. We illustrate these ideas by using the BBN for a hypothetical terrestrial mammal species population and discuss how the BBN can be extended for species with different characteristics, for example, those that can be stockpiled or when there are multiple products. This approach has the potential to help the conservation community to assess the most appropriate regime for managing wildlife trade in a transparent, open, and scientifically based way.

野生动植物的国际商业贸易，无论合法还是非法，都是当今多种野生动植物的最大威胁之一。在保护社区中，关于如何解决该问题的意见分歧很大。方法分为两大类：使贸易成为非法行为以防止任何形式的商业贸易，或允许部分或全部贸易合法化，并寻求通过可持续贸易进行管理。保护界通常对哪个更好的选择抱有两极分化的看法。我们认为，在这些选项之间进行选择的一种方法是考虑生物生产力，管理环境和需求的特定于物种的属性。我们建立了一个概念框架，以评估哪种选择更有可能导致物种的成功保护。我们展示了如何构建贝叶斯信念网络（BBN）来建模这些属性如何（1）相互作用以影响物种种群的可持续性，以及（2）在不同的贸易管理制度下会发生变化。这种方法可以通过根据给定物种的特定特征和环境预测不同贸易管理制度下某个物种种群可能的可持续性结果，来支持基于科学的决策。BBN可以识别保护性干预措施可以改变潜在结果的关键点。它还提供了机会来探索关于人类如何应对不同贸易制度的不同假设如何影响结果。我们通过将BBN用于假设的陆生哺乳动物物种种群来阐明这些想法，并讨论如何将BBN扩展到具有不同特征的物种，例如可以储存的物种或存在多种产品的物种。这种方法有可能帮助保护社区以透明，开放，科学的方式评估最合适的制度来管理野生动植物贸易。