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Poaching for both meat and trophy has always been a major challenge in conservation history. Illegal
trade in wildlife and its products affect the survival of magnitude number of species. The population of
rhinos and elephants for instance has declined in recent years as a result of escalation in organized
trade in their products. This has necessitated many states to take active measures to protect their
biodiversity in recent years.However, wildlife criminals (poachers and traffickers) continue to develop
new ways to circumvent detection and prosecution. Crime investigators on the other hand fail to hold
these criminals responsible with confidence due to lack of reliable forensic tools admissible in courts
of law. The prosecutors try to prove that the suspects have committed crimes on wildlife but fail
because criminals tried to remove overtindicative morphological features specific to poached animals.
Over the recent years, this illegal wildlife poaching has turned into being a highly profitable business
worldwide with remarkably low risks as trials of illegal wildlife traffickers are rare, largely because
law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judicial systems typically consider such crime a low
priority. Large volumes of wildlife including those already at risk are being illegally poached and
traded and if this trend is unabated it threatens future survival of some key species in East Africa
region and beyond. To overt these challenges scientists are racing in arms to develop highly sensitive,
accurate and high throughput DNA based techniques to mitigate these challenges.
One of the leading examples of this development is the institution of a standardized global DNA-
based barcode identification system which provides a simple, universal tool for the identification of
wildlife species and their products.DNA barcoding has now become an accepted and commonly used
method for species identification practiced by taxonomists, ecologists, forensic scientists and other
researchers. A Google-supported Barcode of Wildlife Project (BWP) hosted by the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington,successively initiated these initiatives in Kenya since 2012. Recently, BWP
as expanded these training and technical assistance to new participants in Tanzania through the
recently funded USAID-PEER project since 2015. The new participating institutions are Sokoine
University of Agriculture (SUA) and Tanzania Wildlife Institute (TAWIRI) |
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