Environmental crime is on the rise. Annual rates of growth are between 5% and 7% globally[1]. This is a complex issue to tackle as it is often perpetrated by criminal organisations operating across borders. It also spans a broad range of activities, such as illegal waste management and shipment, illegal logging and trade in timber, illegal water abstraction, pollution, habitats destruction and wildlife trafficking.
Combatting environmental crime requires international cooperation too
This is not only to roll up international networks, but also to account for differing legal frameworks, enforcement mechanisms, and priorities among countries.
Detecting, investigating, and prosecuting environmental crime requires high-quality documentation and evidence
New technologies and methods to detect and analyse environmental changes will play a key role here. The last years have witnessed transformative developments in Earth Observation, particularly from satellite-based platforms[2], leading to data streams of increased spatial, spectral, and temporal detail. Earth Observation-based intelligence provides obvious benefits to environmental crime investigations, greatly strengthening monitoring and inspection capacity. However, it also brings challenges. These include concerns about data privacy, data quality and availability issues, as well as legal constraints related to the admissibility of geospatial-based evidence in court.
Online monitoring of environmental crime-related datasets is an absolute must if we want to safeguard our planet and ensure the sustainable use of our natural resources.
By closely tracking and analysing trends in illegal activities such as poaching, deforestation, and pollution, we can identify hotspots, patterns, and emerging threats in real-time. This information is invaluable to law enforcement agencies, wildlife conservation organisations, and policymakers, enabling them to take prompt and targeted action to address these criminal activities, protect endangered species, and preserve our ecosystems. Furthermore, online monitoring is a great way to make environmental enforcement efforts more transparent and accountable[3], which helps to combat corruption and ensure that perpetrators are held to account for their actions. In an increasingly interconnected world, the timely and accurate monitoring of environmental crime datasets is crucial for the protection of our planet and future generations.
Draxis is developing in the context of PERIVALLON project, a series of on-line data harvesters to parse and digest relevant data from various sources and thus providing integration with third-party data providers for additional data sources. Draxis enables the collection of relevant open data from external databases, data portals, and websites to support the project’s online data gathering. The module leverages APIs to obtain weather forecasts for a specific area of interest while. Two major sources of relevant sources are the Eurostat website and the United Nation website.
From a technical perspective the Online monitoring of relevant open data module is based on Python[4] language leveraging the Eurostat Python Package[5] and Panda’s framework[6] while its functionalities are served using the Flask framework[7]. The module is fully dockerised while the outputs of the harvesting-crawling can be exported as DataFrames[8], showed as graphs using Grafana[9] while the relative information can be stored as JSON files in the PERIVALLON database.
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425719300689?via%3Dihub
[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9116
[5] https://pypi.org/project/eurostat/
[6] https://pandas.pydata.org/
[7] https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/3.0.x/
[8] https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.html