On the overlap between scientific and societal taxonomic attentions — Insights for conservation

Abstract

Attention directed at different species by society and science is particularly relevant within the field of conservation, as societal preferences will strongly impact support for conservation initiatives and their success. Here, we assess the association between societal and research interests in four charismatic and threatened species groups, derived from a range of different online sources and social media platforms as well as scientific publications. We found a high level of concordance between scientific and societal taxonomic attention, which was consistent among assessed species groups and media sources. Results indicate that research is apparently not as disconnected from the interests of society as it is often reproached, and that societal support for current research objectives should be adequate. While the high degree of similarity between scientific and societal interest is both striking and satisfying, the dissimilarities are also interesting, as new scientific findings may constitute a constant source of novel interest for the society. In that respect, additional efforts will be necessary to draw scientific and societal focus towards less charismatic species that are in urgent need of research and conservation attention.

Societal attention toward extinction threats

“…228Two potentially encouraging results of the study are higher societal interest in the two 229 threats in threatened than within non-threatened species, as well as that the IUCN Red List listing of 230 10 threats and their severity in different species were reflected in threat coverage among species. This 231 might suggest a good level of societal attention toward threats and proper coverage of scientific 232 work and available knowledge, supporting recent findings that suggest a high level of overlap 233 between scientific and societal taxonomic attentions(Jarić et al, 2019a). However, while 234 knowledge and awareness of threats is a necessary condition for actual conservation engagement, 235…”

“…Either threat had much higher coverage related to species native for a given 220 country than to those from other countries and regions. People are more knowledgeable of their 221 immediate surroundings, and the species familiarity and the range proximity to or overlap with 222 developed nations are recognized drivers of both societal and scientific taxonomic attention 223Jarić et al, 2019a). This is further strengthened by regional differences and 224 gaps in knowledge and information about these threats, due to strong spatial research biases 225 (Bellard and Jeschke, 2016; Bellard et al, 2018).…”

¿Estamos perdiendo de vista el control biológico de insectos en el ciberespacio?

“…Word frequencies in digitized text can be analyzed with Google Trends or Google Ngram engines (Ladle et al, 2016), while image digitization and machine learning can be used to 'mine' Instagram or Flick archives (Sherren et al, 2017). These non-reactive methods for social science research through text mining and socialmedia analytics all resort under the newly-minted term 'culturomics' (Michel et al, 2011), and have readily been embraced by political science, sociology, linguistics and also conservation biology disciplines (Jarić et al, 2019). Pioneering yet geographically-restricted work has been done in the entomology domain by Takada (2011Takada ( , 2013 and Bragazzi (2014) in Japan and Italy, respectively.…”

Inferring public interest from search engine data requires caution

“…Moreover, considering only a single data source may produce a biased view of changes in public interest toward any topic. We believe that combining results from multiple sources (Veríssimo et al 2014;Cooper et al 2019;Jarić et al 2019) -such as different search engines, social media platforms, online news media, Wikipedia page views, internet blogs and forums -is more likely to provide meaningful insights on social and cultural trends. The exploration of conservation-related topics using digital data sources provides new opportunities for conservation science and practice (Sutherland et al 2018).…”