Articlehybrid2021

The species awareness index as a conservation culturomics metric for public biodiversity awareness

Joseph W. Millard · Richard D. Gregory · Kate E. Jones · Robin Freeman

53 citations0/0 files storedConservation Biology

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Animal and Plant Science Education Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management Conservation, Ecology, Wildlife Education

Abstract

Although threats to global biodiversity are well known, slowing current rates of biodiversity loss remains a challenge. The Aichi targets set out 20 goals on which the international community should act to alleviate biodiversity decline, 1 of which (Target 1) aims to raise public awareness of the importance of biodiversity. Although conventional indicators for Target 1 are of low spatial and temporal coverage, conservation culturomics metrics show how biodiversity awareness can be quantified at the global scale. Following methods used for the Living Planet Index, we devised a species awareness index (SAI) to measure change in species awareness based on Wikipedia views. We calculated this index at the page level for 41,197 species listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) across 10 Wikipedia languages and >2 billion views from 1 July 2015 to 30 March 2020. Bootstrapped indices for the page-level SAI showed that overall awareness of biodiversity increased marginally over time, although there were differences among taxonomic classes and languages. Among taxonomic classes, overall awareness increased fastest for reptiles and slowest for amphibians. Among languages, overall species awareness increased fastest for Japanese and slowest for Chinese and German users. Although awareness of species as a whole increased and was significantly higher for traded species, from January 2016 through January 2020, change in awareness appeared not to be strongly related to whether the species is traded or is a pollinator. As a data source for public biodiversity awareness, the SAI could be integrated into the Conservation International Biodiversity Engagement Indicator.

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2017Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter: Assessing the usability of social media data for visitor monitoring in protected areas 2014Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty 2018Why we love bees and hate wasps 2013Google search patterns suggest declining interest in the environment 2015Quantifying the role of online news in linking conservation research to Facebook and Twitter 2016Using Wikipedia page views to explore the cultural importance of global reptiles 2014Using data from online social networks in conservation science: which species engage people the most on Twitter?2019Characterizing the cultural niches of North American birds

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