The South African wildlife tourism industry is based on trophy hunting and together with international wildlife trade it can represent a major treat to biodiversity conservation. Annually, thousands of hunters participate in hunting activities in South Africa and thousands of trophy items are traded across international borders. This research is a result of comprehensive quantitative analysis in how far data of trophy hunting kills and data of trophy export are consistent on the example of South Africa. Data were extracted from 2 different sources: trade data reported under the CITES Trade Database on export of trophy items from South Africa within the year 2018; South African Professional Hunting statistics (SAPHs) containing trophy kills information for each species and the country of origin of the hunter. In the year 2018, a total of 3,126 hunting trophy items of 28 endangered taxa were exported out of South Africa to 37 countries that contributed to trophy hunting trade in South Africa. However, 64 countries participated in trophy hunting of endangered taxa in South Africa and a total of 4,726 trophy kills of 28 trophy-hunted endangered taxa were reported. Therefore, the level of inconsistence in data of trophy hunting kills and data of trophy hunting export is significant and differs to varying degrees across the countries contributing to trophy hunting and CITES-listed trophy-hunted species. This research provides possible reasons for the inconsistency and propose recommendations for improving the CITES reporting system. / <p>2020-06-10</p>

An international trade in endangered species of plants and animals is regulated by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). Information on trades are available in CITES Trade Database. However, there are a lot of mistakes and discrepancies in this database that lead to inaccurate interpretation of data. The aim of this thesis was to: (1) identify mistakes in the database, record types and their possible ways of interpretation and (2) quantify the volumes of trade based on different ways of data interpretations in selected species of the family Ursidae. There were found 19 different combinations of missing data, except by unlisted unit and traded quantity specified only by one state of the trade and 5 types of record interpretation. Data were compared with the CITES annual records reported by the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic. This thesis contains also recommendations for evaluation of international trade.