Wildlife crimes that involve smuggling threaten national security and biodiversity, cause regional conflicts, and hinder economic development, especially in developing countries with abundant wildlife resources. Over the past few decades, significant headway has been made in combating wildlife smuggling and the related illegal domestic trade in China. Previous studies on the wildlife smuggling trade were mostly based on customs punishment and confiscation data. From the China Judgments Online website, we retrieved cases related to cross-border wildlife and wildlife products smuggling from 2014 to 2020. A total of 510 available cases and 927 records for more than 110 species were registered. We thoroughly studied each judgment and ruling file to extract information on cases, defendants, species, sentences, and origins and destinations of wildlife and wildlife products. Furthermore, frequency of origin-destination place occurrences and spatial patterns of cross-border wildlife crime in China were shown in this data paper. The main purpose of our dataset is to make these wildlife and wildlife products trade data accessible for researchers to develop conservation studies. We expect that this dataset will be valuable for network analysis of regional or global wildlife trafficking, which has attracted global attention. There are no copyright restrictions on the data; we ask that researchers please cite this paper and the associated dataset when using the data in publications.

Data source: The China Judgments Online (CJO) website (https://wenshu.court.gov.cn) provides electronic public access to court records. In 2010, 2013, and 2016, the Supreme People’s Court promulgated and revised the provisions on the publication of judicial documents by people’s courts on the Internet, and the publication of judicial documents has become the responsibility and obligation of courts at all levels (Wu, 2022). Since January 1, 2014, judgment documents must be published on CJO within seven days of their enforcement, and cannot be amended, replaced or revoked without court authority. Up to now, the CJO has become an important channel for the publication of judgments documents.

Data collection: The collection time of this dataset is up to September 2021. We searched for “wildlife” and “smuggling” on the China referee’s website. Then, we screened these judgment documents according to the following criteria: (I) the full text can be accessed, and the case involves the crimes of illegal hunting, sale, acquisition, transportation, or smuggling of wildlife or wildlife products (including rare and endangered wildlife or wildlife products) overseas and (II) when there are multiple judgment documents in the same lawsuit, such as any subsequent retrial of a case, filing and hearing of different perpetrators in batches, a consistent case number (record) was assigned.

Data compilation: These judicial documents provide the process of tracing criminal information. We collected as detailed information as possible, such as the date of the seizure, the location of the seizure, the type of illegal activities, the items seized, the source of the items seized, and the actual or expected destination. We used these criteria: (I) on the premise of protecting the personal information in the judgment documents, we obtained the education level and nationality of the principal defendants; (II) for the origin and destination of wildlife or its products, in addition to recording the national, provincial, county, and city levels, the information should be as accurate as possible to specific geographical names by obtaining longitude and latitude coordinate data through Baidu map (https://map.baidu.com/) and Google map (https://www.google.com/maps); and (III) for the identification of “crocodile,” “modern elephant,” “pangolin scale,” and other identifications that are not accurate to the species level in the judgment documents, only the upper classification (genus) level was recorded (i.e., “Crocodylus,” “Loxodonta,” “Manis”; Figure 3). If only the Chinese common name of the species was given but the Latin scientific name was not given, we queried the corresponding species in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Red List of Threatened Species (hereafter: IUCN Red List; https://www.iucnredlist.org) for supplemental information. Eventually these records were translated from Chinese to English.

Quality control: Due to the need to extract information by reading many parties’ statements, defenders’ opinions, examination instructions, and other words, the preliminary preparation was mainly to discuss the standardized methods and steps of data collection, and the division of labor and training of personnel involved in data collection tasks. In the data entry and summary stage, established data collection methods and steps were followed to reduce human errors. In the data inspection stage, we cross checked the obtained data and missing values with the author to ensure the accuracy of data input. If there were questions, the lead author and Luo would revisit the original judgment documents and make a final decision after discussion with the other authors.