Seizure Ledger · Cameroon · 2006–2024

Trafficked Fauna, on the Record

Eighteen years of documented wildlife seizures, arrests, and smuggling routes across Cameroon — mapped, counted, and filterable by species, region, and year.

pangolin scales & specimens catalogued — by far the most trafficked group in the record, driven by the international demand that has made the pangolin the world's most trafficked mammal.
01

Where seizures happen

circle size ∝ specimens · click a point
02

The shape of the trade

Incidents per year

documented records, filtered

Specimens by group

total individuals / items seized

Regions most affected

incident count by administrative region

Seasonality

incidents by calendar month
03

The records

Year Month Action Fauna seized Location Region Specimens Vitals
04

The story behind the data

Horn und Tusk · project record

How this began. In 2024 our focus broadened from conflict to include conservation, after encountering the aftermath of poaching first-hand in the South West Region. What followed was an exhaustive review of the state of the illicit wildlife trade in Cameroon — and the realization that no consolidated record of it existed. So we built one: the first open-access wildlife trafficking incident dataset for the country, two decades of scattered seizure reports, court records, and press accounts structured into the single resource you are looking at now.

What the data science found — and didn't. We put the dataset through a battery of data-science methods, from forecasting to pattern mining. Most came up short: the record is too sparse and too uneven for these tools to produce reliable results. That negative result was itself the most useful finding. Many of the areas most in need of attention had no data at all, and where data existed it was scattered across disconnected reports and papers. That realization is, in part, why Horn und Tusk exists.

METHODS WRITE-UP · COMING SOON