Social media conservation messaging mirrors age‐old taxonomic biases in public domain

Abstract

In this global extinction crisis, we must act urgently to prevent the loss of species. The public plays a key role in ensuring the future of our biodiversity, by impacting funding decisions, creating behaviour change, and pushing change in corporations to prevent species loss. The Threatened Species Bake Off competition is a social media initiative created by the Australian Government in 2017 to raise awareness of nationally listed threatened species. In this study, we assessed the trends of the competition by collating entries via Instagram and Twitter in its first 5 years. Representations of 356 unique species were baked, 261 of which were listed as nationally threatened species. Birds and mammals were the most popular groups represented. Frogs, reptiles, fishes, and invertebrates were reasonably well represented; however, plants were drastically underrepresented in the competition. This is evidence of taxonomic bias towards the charismatic animals, and a problematic lack of representation of other threatened species that play essential roles in our ecosystems. Although the Bake Off is an innovative conservation messaging approach, it reinforces awareness of the same groups that traditional messaging techniques encouraged (i.e., charismatic megafauna). Public engagement in this competition reflects current conservation messaging, including media and education focus on charismatic animals, demonstrating engrained biases. Future competitions should address this by highlighting less popular but equally important threatened species, especially plants.

Using photo editing to understand the impact of species aesthetics on support for conservation

“…For example although mammals make up less than 10% of all known vertebrate species, they are the focus of over 40% of articles in leading conservation journals (Clark & May, 2002). In addition, mammals and birds are far more likely to be the subjects of conservation campaigns (McGowan et al., 2020), shown on social media (Forster et al., 2023; Shaw et al., 2022), and thus are more likely to be known and recognised. Mammals and birds also tend to receive more funding for their protection, despite not always being the most threatened (Davies et al., 2018).…”

Taxonomies of exclusion: Storytelling, naming and classification in an age of extinction

“…But with thousands of species at risk, the ways in which extinction is approached and storied are changing. Taxonomic bias in conservation, research and the stories shared, whether in media, literary narratives or even schoolbooks (Clark and May, 2002;Heise, 2016;Gangwani and Landin, 2018;Forster et al, 2023), exemplify how these issues are entangled and in need of a transdisciplinary perspective to tackle them. Indeed, authors are responding to the impetus to look beyond charismatic and flagship species and share stories across different forms of art that respond to the sixth extinction crisis.…”

Exploring the potential for online data sources to enhance species threat mapping through the case study of global bat exploitation

“…Despite its demonstrated value in conservation science, the reliability of online content in informing species threats (i.e., the ability to consistently represent on‐the‐ground trends) has not been comprehensively assessed. Societal attention is generally skewed toward charismatic species (Forster et al., 2023), and peaks in online commentary on conservation topics can be generated by global events, such as disease outbreaks (Cerri et al., 2022). For example, aggregating media reports of wildlife trade seizures overrepresents endangered species and underestimates total seizures (Paudel et al., 2022).…”