Illegal online trade of invasive plants in Australia

The project contains data and code used in our project investigating the illegal online trade of invasive plants in Australia. The dataset titled 'plant_trade_dataset.csv' contains cleaned and consolidated detection records from online advertisements for plants. The dataset titled 'weed_trade_dataset.csv' is a subset of the 'plant_trade_dataset.csv' dataset containing records of plants advertised which are prohibited to trade in at least one Australian jurisdiction. The advertisements were collected from an Australian online classifieds website which we have purposefully kept confidential in accordance with the ethics approval of this project. As such all information that could identify a user of the website has also been removed. However, this dataset still provides all necessary information needed to replicate the analysis of this study. We have provided R scripts which can be used to replicate the results of the study. ‘string_matching.R’ provides an example of how string matching was used to detect desired advertisements. This code uses ‘faux_web_scraped_data.csv’, ‘faux_plant_terms.csv’ and ‘incoreect_term_matches.csv’ to demonstrate how it functions. ‘quantity_price_permutation_code.R’ is the code used for analysing the effect of trade prohibition on quantity and price, along with the formatted datasets ‘qty_law_comp.csv’ for quantity and ‘price_law_comp’ for price. The remaining analysis (i.e., species accumulation, trade quantity, and use of traded taxa) was performed with code from the ‘analysis_code.R’ script.