Culturomics for (not against!) protected areas

Souza, Carolina Neves; Rodrigues, Ana Carla; Correia, Ricardo A.; Normande, Iran C.; Costa, Hugo C. M.; Guedes-Santos, Jhonatan; Malhado, Ana C. M.; Carvalho, Adriana Rosa; Ladle, Richard J.

doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109197

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Thus, all social media data requires extensive cleaning and critical analysis [ 15 ]. Despite such limitations, the enormous volumes of data generated by social media platforms such as Twitter mean that their analysis can certainly generate insights into the perceptions of non-social media users [ 18 ] and, critically, allows the evaluation of macroscopic patterns of human-nature interactions [ 81 ]. Acknowledging both the limitations and potentials inherent in utilising social media as a means of investigation, we propose the integration of various online data sources, such as Wikipedia, Instagram, Facebook, and offline methodologies like questionnaires.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Brazilian protected areas through social media: Insights from 10 years of public interest and engagement

Souza,

Almeida,

Correia

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

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Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to 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 analysed the content of these tweets and calculated metrics of user engagement (likes and retweets) to uncover patterns and drivers of public interest in Brazilian PAs. Our results indicate that users / tweets mentioning PAs remained stable throughout the sample period. However, engagement with tweets grew steeply, particularly from 2018 onward and coinciding with a change in the Brazilian federal government. Furthermore, public interest was not evenly distributed across PAs; while national parks were the subject of 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 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 PA policy, governance and management.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Brazilian protected areas through social media: Insights from 10 years of public interest and engagement

Souza,

Almeida,

Correia

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The term national park reversed the overall decline in interest in conservation from 2013 to 2019 (Figure 2). Interest in conservation abruptly decreased after 2019 (Figure 2), potentially due to worldwide visitation restrictions to national parks during the COVID-19 pandemic (Souza et al, 2021). National park closures might have substantially contributed to an overall decrease in interest in conservation (Bates et al, 2021).…”

Section: Spatiotemporal Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating global interest in biodiversity and conservation

Caetano

Vardi

Jarić

et al. 2023

Conservation Biology

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The first target of the Convention for Biological Diversity (Aichi target 1) was to increase public awareness of the values of biodiversity and actions needed to conserve it—a key prerequisite for other conservation targets. Monitoring success in achieving this target at a global scale has been difficult; however, increased digitization of human life in recent decades has made it easier to measure people's interests at an unprecedented scale and allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of Aichi target 1 than previously attempted. We used Google search volume data for over a thousand search terms related to different aspects of biodiversity and conservation to evaluate global interest in biodiversity and its conservation. We also investigated the correlation of interest in biodiversity and conservation across countries to variables related to biodiversity, economy, demography, research, education, internet use, and presence of environmental organizations. From 2013 to 2020, global searches for biodiversity components increased, driven mostly by searches for charismatic fauna (59% of searches were for mammal species). Searches for conservation actions, driven mostly by searches for national parks, decreased since 2019, likely due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Economic inequality was negatively correlated with interest in biodiversity and conservation, whereas purchasing power was indirectly positively correlated with higher levels of education and research. Our results suggest partial success toward achieving Aichi target 1 in that interest in biodiversity increased widely, but not for conservation. We suggest that increased outreach and education efforts aimed at neglected aspects of biodiversity and conservation are still needed. Popular topics in biodiversity and conservation could be leveraged to increase awareness of other topics with attention to local socioeconomic contexts.

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Culturomics for (not against!) protected areas

Cited by 2 publications

References 6 publications

Assessing Brazilian protected areas through social media: Insights from 10 years of public interest and engagement

Assessing Brazilian protected areas through social media: Insights from 10 years of public interest and engagement

Evaluating global interest in biodiversity and conservation

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