WHAT WE DO
DATA VISUALISATION & DASHBOARDS
Designed to show how accessible data can be. We build interactive platforms that bring data to life.
CASE STUDY
Mapping the Trade: Building a Public Intelligence Dashboard for Wildlife Crime in Hispanic America
Go Insight collaborated with IFAW to support their on-going efforts to address wildlife crime across Hispanic America.
The Challenge
Wildlife crime poses a threat to biodiversity worldwide, and Hispanic America is no exception. IFAW had gathered seizure and poaching data spanning 18 countries between 2017 and 2022, a rich resource with potential to drive change. The data presented a great opportunity: to build the first comprehensive, navigable baseline on trafficking trends across the region.
To realise that potential, one key challenge needed solving. Records varied in their level of taxonomic detail, an incident might report only “turtle” or “monkey” rather than a specific species, reflecting the reality of how wildlife enforcement data is captured.
The goal was to transform this fragmented but valuable dataset into a platform campaigners, policymakers, and researchers could explore and act on.
What We Built
Go Insight designed an interactive public-facing dashboard in Power BI, transforming the raw incident data into a searchable, explorable intelligence tool. The dashboard was built to handle taxonomic inconsistency. Rather than requiring species-level precision, it allowed users to explore data across all taxonomic levels (class, family, genus) as well as species.
The tool brought together a regional heat map showing incident density across Hispanic America, year-by-year incident trends, country-level breakdowns with poaching and seizure data, and a drill-down commodity analysis showing how animals were being trafficked (live or as parts, for example).
We also integrated CITES data and IUCN species assessments, enriching the incident records with conservation status and trade regulation context to support better analysis of species vulnerability.
Insights Unlocked
Across 1,945 incidents and 102,577 animals representing 690 species, the full scale of wildlife crime in the region became visible for the first time in a single tool.
The dashboard revealed the geographic concentration of wildlife crime across the region, with Mexico and Colombia emerging as hotspots. It showed that 92.5% of trafficked animals were moved live, and that 62% of species involved are assessed as Least Concern by the IUCN Red List – insights that can be compared across the region and tracked throughout the six-year period.
Users could drill into the data by crime type, country, species, or commodity type and with CITES listing status and IUCN assessments integrated, each insight carried the conservation and regulatory context needed to act on it.
Impact
By integrating IFAW’s incident data with CITES listings and IUCN species assessments, Go Insight supported IFAW to host a powerful, publicly accessible tool for research, law enforcement and advocacy, transforming a complex, multi-country picture of wildlife crime across the region navigable for the first time.