Brazilian Protected Areas on Twitter: A 10-year Overview

Abstract

Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to the public interest in nature and conservation. Here, we use the micro-blogging social network Twitter to explore trends in public interest in Brazilian protected areas (PAs). We identified ~400,000 Portuguese language tweets pertaining to all categories of Brazilian PAs over a ten-year period (1 January 2011 - 31 December 2020). We analyzed the content of these tweets and metrics of their engagement to uncover patterns and drivers of public engagement with Brazilian PAs. Our results indicate a steep growth in tweets mentioning protected areas, especially from 2016 onwards. Nevertheless, public interest was not evenly distributed across PAs: while national parks generated the most tweets, mainly related to tourism activities, tweets related to conflicts among park users and managers were more likely to engage Twitter users. Our study clearly highlights that automatic or semi-automatic monitoring of social media content and engagement has great potential as an early warning system to identify emerging conflicts and to generate data and metrics to support environmental policy and management at the level of individual PAs or PA networks.