Building a global taxonomy of wildlife offenses

Most countries have many pieces of legislation that govern biodiversity, including a range of criminal, administrative, and civil law provisions that state how wildlife must be legally used, managed, and protected. However, related debates in conservation, such as about enforcement, often overlook the details within national legislation that define which specific acts are illegal, the conditions under which laws apply, and how they are sanctioned. Based on a review of 90 wildlife laws in 8 high‐biodiversity countries with different legal systems, we developed a taxonomy that describes all types of wildlife offenses in those countries. The 511 offenses are organized into a hierarchical taxonomy that scholars and practitioners can use to help conduct legal analyses. This is significant amidst competing calls to strengthen, deregulate, and reform wildlife legislation, particularly in response to fears over zoonotic threats and large‐scale biodiversity loss. It can be used to provide more nuance legal analyses and facilitate like‐for‐like comparisons across countries, informing processes to redraft conservation laws, review deregulation efforts, close loopholes, and harmonize legislation across jurisdictions. We applied the taxonomy in a comparison of sanctions in 8 countries for hunting a protected species. We found not only huge ranges in fines (US$0 to $200,000) and imprisonment terms (1.5 years to life imprisonment), but also fundamentally different approaches to designing sanctions for wildlife offenses. The taxonomy also illustrates how future legal taxonomies can be developed for other environmental issues (e.g., invasive species, protected areas).


Legal details matter to conservation
Most countries have many pieces of legislation that govern biodiversity, including a range of criminal, administrative, and civil law provisions that state how wildlife must be legally used, managed, and protected. However, debates about wildlife conservation often overlook legal mechanics-the details within national legislation that define which acts are legal and illegal, the conditions under which laws apply, and how violations are sanctioned. Yet, legislation can only be operationalized (by government officials, prosecutors, judges), reviewed, and contested (by citizens, parliaments, lawyers) in the context of existing legal details that define specifically what acts are limited or allowed. Legal analyses and comparisons within and across countries are important, especially amidst efforts to strengthen and reform legislation in response to zoonotic disease risks and unprecedented biodiversity loss.
Few tools are available to help scholars and practitioners define, analyze, and systematically compare illegal acts in the environment sector. This is important because terminology, governing approaches, and rules vary widely across cultural contexts, legal traditions, and jurisdictions (Van Hoecke & Warrington, 1998). For example, critical details, such as the definitions of wildlife, descriptions of specific illegal acts, and permitting procedures, are often inconsistent within and across countries; analyses of those differences and ensuring clarity are important. Moreover, wildlife governance involves many areas of law (e.g., related to harvest quotas, permitted technologies, animal welfare standards, import and export rules, quarantine requirements). This can challenge conservation practitioners, who often lack legal training, and even legal professionals whose expertise is often limited to specific sectors and jurisdictions.
We constructed a globally relevant, concept-driven taxonomy for categorizing criminal, civil, and administrative law offenses related to terrestrial wild fauna. The taxonomy serves to parse legislation (e.g., Figure 1) and presents a hierarchically structured framework that can be used to analyze and compare wildlife legislation across countries. For example, we apply the taxonomy to compare how 8 countries sanction the offense of hunting a protected species to demonstrate how this resource can facilitate comparative legal analysis to inform conservation.

Purposes of taxonomies
Taxonomies-involving classification and naming based on similarities and differences-are a familiar concept in conservation (Thomson et al., 2018). Similarly, across criminology, customs, banking, information systems, and law, taxonomies provide a common lexicon and discrete categories to facilitate communication, collaboration, and harmonization across cultures, languages, and jurisdictions, as well as to understand where there is divergence (e.g., UNODC core areas of criminal law [Bisogno et al. 2015]; World Customs Organization Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System [WCO 2020]).

FIGURE 1
Example anatomy of a legal provision, which typically includes an offense, facets that qualify that offense, and statement of the penalty for violations In law taxonomies provide the "devices," "grammar," and "common dictionary" that improve access, enable translation, and support comparison within and across systems (Bisogno et al., 2015;Mattei, 1997). Legal taxonomies often focus on how countries organize their laws (e.g., Mattei, 1997;Sherwin, 2009), but can also be used to organize legislation around specific topics (e.g., cybercrimes [Land et al., 2013]). They are a cornerstone of legal analysis within a country, which often requires the sorting of rules in ways that allow generalizations (Sherwin, 2009) or facilitate access to all laws that may apply to a certain concept. As such, taxonomies can help identify laws that might be useful in a certain case, that represent loopholes, or that need updating. In comparative law, taxonomies are a "prerequisite to make the knowledge and the problem-solving experience acquired in one system of law understandable and possibly transferable to another" (Mattei, 1997), such as understanding how other jurisdictions are tackling challenging issues. Comparative law can serve to distinguish legal approaches among countries or to identify the types of laws that might be considered as part of a legal revision. Taxonomies can also inform harmonization efforts of legislation across systems (e.g., across the European Union [Law, 2011]); help standardize global reporting (e.g., Bisogno et al., 2015); and facilitate information sharing and lawenforcement cooperation (Land et al., 2013). Importantly, these efforts require an underlying taxonomy that names and categorizes diverse legal concepts.

Need for a taxonomy of wildlife offenses
Across contexts and scales, structured legal analyses and comparisons can inform conservation scholarship and practice. Domestically, a legal taxonomy can help identify legal gaps and drafting mistakes. This includes internal conflicts such as when one piece of legislation prohibits a certain action but another provides permissions or when sanctions differ across pieces of legislation. For example, in Thailand reforms in 2019 closed loopholes that previously left non-native threatened species unprotected (USAID, 2019); a legal taxonomy can identify parallel legislation that need revision for alignment.
Structured legal analyses are also important where larger reforms are proposed. For example, a number of high-level policy events have called for strengthened wildlife laws (e.g., Hanoi, 2016; UK, 2019; US, 2019), and the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted proposals to better regulate the sanitary conditions in wildlife markets (Lancet, 2020) and ban all or most wildlife trade (Aguirre et al., 2020). Such reforms require specificity about particular offenses and concurrence across areas of law. For example, reform to ban wildlife trade would require revisions affecting dozens of human actions whose legality is codified across different areas of law (e.g., rules on harvest, market sanitation, international commerce, internet marketing).
A taxonomy is important to revising legislation. For example, concern about the social and ethical impacts of overcriminalization (Duffy et al, 2019;Masse et al. 2020) has prompted calls to allow more legal, sustainable wildlife use (e.g., Challender et al., 2015;PNP, 2020). Related legal reforms would require revisions across legislation to clarify rights, establish processes (e.g., permits) and set standards (e.g., quotas).
A taxonomy can also facilitate international comparisons, revealing different approaches to wildlife governance. For example, some countries' legislation, such Somalia, Somaliland, Yemen, and Ethiopia, rely on broad prohibitions against wildlife use, whereas others articulate wildlife management, use, and protections according to specific requirements. The Cheetah Conservation Fund and its partners are working to expand and strengthen legislation in the region (CCF, 2019), and international legal comparisons can identify gaps and opportunities by revealing how other countries have legislated similar situations. Similarly, in Indonesia, NGOs are helping update the Natural Resources Conservation Law 5/1990 with reforms to close loopholes for online wildlife trade, strengthen sanctions, and update the protected species list (Gokoon, 2018). The taxonomy can help identify how these issues have been legislated in other countries. Indeed, comparative analysis can inform discussions about international legal harmonization to uphold minimum standards (Pennings, 2004). For example, there are calls to standardize the treatment of illegal wildlife trade as a "serious and organized crime" globally (e.g., UK 2019) and for countries to strengthen domestic legislation to meet international conservation commitments (e.g., CITES & UNEP, 2015).
Concurrently, there are deregulatory efforts to weaken wildlife legislation, including weakening of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (Friedman, 2019), multiple environmental regulations in Brazil (Spring, 2020), and protected area degazettment (Pack et al., 2016). Patterns of weakening wildlife legislation require understanding of what species, contexts, and acts are being revised so that conservationists can respond with legal challenges.

METHODS
We developed the taxonomy based on a structured analysis of the wildlife laws of 8, purposely selected countries from the Global South: Angola, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, and Vietnam. These were chosen to reflect a range of high-biodiversity countries with diverse legal systems (Table 1). We avoided United States-and Eurocentric tendencies of many legal taxonomies (Mattei, 1997), recognizing that the legacies of these systems were already strongly reflected in the sampled countries (e.g., British common law informs the legal systems of Costa Rica, Mexico, Kenya, and Brazil) ( Table 1).
The research followed steps described in Land et al. (2013). First, we collected all relevant legislation from each country and determined its metacharacteristics by organizing all wildlife offenses from the source material. This involved an empiricalto-conceptual approach, in which offenses were sorted according to language and then grouped into conceptual clusters that described different offenses. This was then used to develop the typology, which is likely to grow and evolve as it is applied to other countries (Land et al., 2013).

Approach to comparative law
While there are a number of databases that compile wildlife legislation, most are limited to the identification of basic content and keyword searches (e.g., U.S. Library of Congress' Law Library, VLex Justis, Codices, Fastcase's Public Library of Law). Instead, we took a concept-driven approach to legal taxonomies and organized "law according to a set of structural rules" in a descriptive way and with an aim of clarification, overview, and coherence (cf. Sherwin, 2009). It focuses on what is empirically observable in pieces of legislation and captures the language in legislation and the concept it conveys. This reflects the approach taken by the Ecolex and Legal Atlas databases, which organize legislation into subject categories (although the Ecolex categories, such as "forestry" and "water" are too coarse to allow nuanced research into different types of wildlife offenses). A concept-driven approach has limitations, including its crude classification of the complexities inherent to law (Waddams in Law, 2011); debates about what might be considered moral, superior, or legitimate (see Beyleveld & Brownsword, 1985); and its relative lack of context (Van Hoecke & Warrington, 1998). Laws, as they are written, reflect only a small part of environmental governance and practices. Top-down legal frameworks are regularly interrogated and reshaped, and de jure realities often differ from codified rules (see Cleaver, 2017). Formal, stated law has many limitations including related to their legitimacy on the ground, colonial legacies, and entrenched discrimination (e.g., Ashaba, 2020). Moreover, there is growing recognition of the need to better incorporate diverse values and ontologies into governance (Diaz et al., 2015). In addition, the taxonomy does not explore the implementation or enforcement of legislation, which depends on capacity, resources, priorities, context, and procedural law issues (e.g., whether the provision is a formal part of the criminal code, is a separate legislation but recognized by the criminal code, or whether is an entirely administrative provision). Nevertheless, our approach responds to the ubiquity and hegemony of formal legislation in many countries, where it provides protection to species and helps shape the rights, livelihoods, identities, and norms of many people (see Agrawal & Bauwer 2005;Cleaver, 2017;Epstein, 2006). Better understanding of legal mechanics, via a taxonomy that facilitates unpacking the formal rules, is thus valuable across contexts-including for those working within the constraints of formal law (e.g., legal drafting and revision), those who research and critique law (e.g., green criminology, environmental law), and for those challenging that state (e.g., via protest, courts, judicial reviews).

Compilation of legislation
For each of the 8 sampled countries, we searched for legislation associated with 44 types or subjects of law across criminal, administrative, and civil law that previous experience has demonstrated can refer to wildlife (Supporting information Appendix S1 (e.g., CITES [ Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species] national implementing legislation, protected area law, administrative code, criminal code, and laws related to quarantine regulations, anti-money laundering, cybercrime and export). Not all the countries had legislation in each subjects, whereas some had multiple laws on the same subject (e.g., Kenya), depending on each jurisdiction's degree of legal development. When possible, subordinate implementing regulations were also collected. For example, a country's act on wildlife and hunting might introduce what actions are offenses, accompanied by a subordinate regulation that sets out the specifics of implementation (e.g., sanctions).
Laws were first sourced from official government websites, but because many countries lack a centralized system for compiling legislation, laws were also compiled from online legal sources (Supporting information Appendix S2). In total, 194 pieces of legislation were compiled and reviewed to check whether they matched our inclusion criteria: whether they related to terrestrial fauna (fisheries and flora were excluded due to the scale of the analysis) and whether they included direct reference to illegal acts or penalties. This yielded a list of 90 pieces of legislation (Table 1, Supporting information Appendix S2). Although systematic review protocols are increasingly formalized in conservation, they are not established in the legal field. Our objective was saturation to create a nearly exhaustive list of offenses. Collection and analysis were conducted from June through November 2019.

Data extraction
For each piece of legislation, we followed the "indexing process" of the American National Standards Institute and National Information Standards Organization (2005). This drew on the standard elements in the anatomy of a legal provision (Figure 1). Despite variability, legislation across countries consistently includes a description of the offense (actus reus). We extracted the exact wording used to express each offense, focusing on the verb that described a specific identifiable illegal act. We further followed an internal set of protocols for dealing with common challenges that emerge when comparing laws across countries (Supporting information Appendix S3). Indexing yielded a list of 1548 candidate terms for offenses that described a variety of illegal acts. Most terms (62%) were identified in English; the rest were translated from Spanish and Portuguese with Google Translate and checked by researchers fluent in both languages. We used a thesaurus to identify additional synonyms for describing each offense. We interpreted the legal concept expressed by each term, clustered them, identified synonyms, and removed equivalent terms (semantic analysis) (ANSI & NISO, 2005; Supporting information Appendix S4). For example, the concept of hunting was represented in legislation by 33 terms involving 15 different verbs (e.g., kill, killing, catch, catching), which were treated as synonyms. The terms that appeared most frequently in the data set were selected as the preferred term used in the taxonomy (ANSI & NISO, 2005).
Legal provisions also include so-called facets that further define or qualify the offense (e.g., time, place, status of completion, knowledge, and intent of the responsible party); identify the victim (e.g., protected species vs. unprotected), and can determine who may be held liable for an offense (e.g., persons, government officials, and legal entities) (Figure 1). We separated out facets so as to focus on the base criminal act without losing the comparative and analytical understanding held by the facets. We collected the facets from each piece of legislation and identified 9 common categories of recurring facets (Supporting information Appendix S5). We further identified the recurring types of sanctions that applied to each offense (Supporting information Appendix S6) and developed a list of common aggravating or mitigating circumstances that defined the scope and scale of sanctions that apply for any given offense (Appendix S7).

Categories in the taxonomy
We used iterative sorting and reduction to create a taxonomy with a 4-level hierarchical structure (ANSI & NISO, 2005) fol-lowing Bisogno et al. (2015) (Supporting information Appendix S8). Level 1 of the taxonomy was the broadest category and contained offenses associated with the harvest, transport, use of wildlife, forgery, and obstruction of justice (corruption and organized crime were not included here due to scope). Each category was then further divided into mutually exclusive subcategories.
In level 2 of the taxonomy, acts were sorted following a common pattern: acts that were prohibited; acts conducted without legal authorization (e.g., permitting, registration); acts conducted in violation of authorized standard or procedures (e.g., quotas, size limits, transportation requirements, welfare standards), and acts conducted with wildlife of an illegal origin. In addition, a final catch-all category captured "other acts in violation of the law related to…". This reflects a common legal drafting practice that involves a generic declaration intended to criminalize acts, even when they are not explicitly listed as offenses in those sections of the law. Levels 3 and 4 of the taxonomy reflected further specificity of the acts, often informed by facets that defined the conditions under which an act is illegal ( Figure 1). Where we deduced that acts were missing from the taxonomy, we added these (7 acts), and where acts involved generic terms (e.g., importing goods) we made these specific to a wildlife context (e.g., importing wildlife).

Taxonomy of wildlife offenses
We developed a taxonomy that identifies and organizes all types of wildlife offenses present in 8 sampled countries. It consists of 511 offense types organized into a 4-level hierarchy (e.g., Table 2). The full taxonomy is provided in Supporting information Appendix S8. Level 1 presents 16 broad categories of wildlife offense, and each subsequent level identifies a more specific offense (e.g., level 2 has 82 categories, level 3 has 296 categories). Each offense is identified with a numeric code of 4 numbers that refer to its position in the hierarchy (ISO, 2017). For example, in the code 02-03-003-005, the 02 refers to the second item in level 1 of the taxonomy.
The 511 types of offenses were subject to diverse sanctions. We documented 17 categories of sanctions for wildlife offenses, ranging from fines and incarceration to warning letters, license suspension, and community service (Supporting information Appendix S6). We also identified 5 categories of common aggravating and mitigating circumstances that informed the scale of those sanctions (Supporting information Appendix S7).
This can form part of a stock-taking exercise for identifying gaps or inconsistencies in a single country or be a first step in international comparisons. Alternatively, in a taxonomy-to-law approach an offense listed in the taxonomy is selected and then identified in the laws of different countries. This facilitates likefor-like comparisons and can be used to consider differences in which acts are legal or illegal across jurisdictions, the types of conditions (facets) that shape offenses, and the associated sanctions.

Example of how sanctions for hunting a protected species differ across 8 countries
We illustrate one use of the taxonomy by comparing sanctions for illegally hunting a protected species in different countries. All the countries in the sample had a list of nationally protected species, although the criteria for inclusion in this list varied widely (e.g., based on national science-based evaluations, using International Union for Conservation of Nature data, listing iconic species, using CITES-listed species). In all of the coun-tries, legislation stated that hunting these protected species is illegal (as a criminal offense). We identified relevant legislation in each country (2-4 relevant pieces in each) and used the taxonomy and facets to compare how the same illegal act was sanctioned in different countries (Table 4). Minimum fines ranged from $0 to nearly $200,000, and maximum imprisonment terms ranged from 1.5 years to life imprisonment (Table 4). Importantly, comparative analysis revealed different approaches to setting sanctions for hunting protected species (Table 5, Supporting information Appendix S6). For example, Costa Rica exclusively used imprisonment sanctions and employed no monetary fines for hunting protected species (fines apply only to hunting unprotected species). This likely reveals a comparatively strict, highly criminalized conservation approach, although the maximum imprisonment term was notably lower than other countries. Similarly, Kenya had both fixed fines and imprisonment for hunting protected species.
Comparison further revealed that sanctions were defined by a range of country-specific facets that can yield insights about novel sanctioning strategies, potential loopholes, and neighboring country standards (Table 5). For example, fines in Mexico Hunting without authorization (02-02-000-000) Victims' legal status: offenses relate to species that are not protected (protected species covered by Art.

92)
Drafting language suggests there is a permitting process that might enable torturing, molesting, and injuring wildlife, which is presumably a mistake in the act.
(b) deals in a wildlife trophy; Operating as a wildlife trophy dealer without authorization (06-02-001-000) NA (c) deals in a live wildlife species; Trading wildlife without authorization (07-02-000-000)   , 1970-2018, Wildlife Law, 1992-2017Indonesia: Conservation of Living Sources andthe Ecosystems Act, 1990, Environmental Protection andManagement Law, 2003;Kenya: Wildlife Conservation and Management Act No. 47 of 2013, Environmental Management and Coordination Act, 1999, Criminal Code, 1930Mexico: Environmental Law, 1988-2018, Criminal Code, 1931-2018, Wildlife Law, 2000  *Facets that further define or qualify the offense, identify the victim or determine who may be held liable are underlined. In the taxonomy, this offense is identified as #02-01-000-000, and the facet is protected species. The notes identify different aggravating and mitigating circumstances that inform the scope and nature of the sanction that applies to this offense in each country.
were conditional on the offender's salary, which could potentially increase the equity dimensions and deterrence of sanctions. Equally, they could be manipulated to enable lower sanctions for responsible parties who benefit significantly from environmental crime or whose salary bore no relation to their actual wealth derived from illicit income. In Brazil, maximum sanctions applied only if the offender's motivation was for profit, providing need-greed distinctions (cf. Roe, 2015) that may also speak to social equity concerns, but also potentially open up opportunities for manipulation. Economic sanctions were also allocated depending on the number of specimens, rather than per offense, potentially helping ensure that the scale of sanctions better reflects the scale of harm. In Cambodia maximum sentencing applied only to cases in a protected area, which could be problematic because protected biodiversity often exists outside protected areas (Boakes et al., 2019), and many wildlife seizures occur along trade chains. Cambodia also allowed for payment of fines to replace prison terms, which favors wealthier perpetrators. Angola set fines based on the market values of wildlife, which conflates market values as a proxy for the social, ecological, and intrinsic values of wildlife.
These legal details are relevant to practitioners. For example, recent calls to ban all or most wildlife trade would require a range of legal reforms including significant expansions of protected species lists that currently define the offence. These are now typically reserved for a subset of species, and the taxonomy highlights how these facets often shape sanction regimes (Table 5), which would have to be revised to consider all or most wildlife. New bans would also need to review the sanction regimes associated with increased criminalization. The taxonomy highlights many, fundamentally different approaches to sanctioning (e.g., Tables 4 & 5), which are central to mounting debates about which sanctions are most effective and equitable (Wilson & Boratto, 2020). Structured legal comparisons could facilitate learning among neighbors and further debate about the options, their strengths, and limitations Understanding law admittedly requires more than comparisons of illegal acts and sanctions. Laws are best understood within their different political-cultural and economic contexts (see Harring et al., 2019). For example, this legal analysis highlights that Indonesia's lack of minimum imprisonment sentencing sets it in contrast with many other countries (Table 5), but this overlooks the fact that Indonesia also does not set minimum sentencing for murder of humans. Similarly, differences in human dependence on wildlife resources and cultural associations with wildlife vary significantly across the identified countries, and so too should their legal approaches. Nevertheless, legal reform and critique still require appreciation for the stated law itself, which is at the heart of this taxonomy.
The taxonomy provides a working draft for understanding and comparing wildlife offenses cross jurisdictions that will likely develop as it is tested across contexts and for diverse purposes (Land et al., 2013). It can serve as an organizational and decision-making tool (Law, 2011) including to help identify and articulate the approaches and legal elements that need reform (or revolution). Legislation also offers tangible manifestations of humanity's diverse relationships to nature and can yield insights into countries' approaches to wildlife governance (Marguiles et al. 2019). Our example application of the taxonomy, to reveal different approaches to sanctions for hunting protected species, points to a range of academic and practical conservation debates that could provide insight through engagement with the mechanics of domestic legislation via structured analyses.