A culturomics approach to quantifying the salience of species on the global internet

Abstract

Abstract Conservation will only be successful over the long term if people support conservation goals. While many factors may influence the level of such support, it is clear that people are more willing to conserve species and places that they are familiar with and which provide them with something they value. Until now this dimension has been largely lacking from conservation decision‐making and its underlying scientific evidence base. This is understandable given conservation scientists' historic focus on population and community ecology and the practical difficulties associated with assessing the cultural prominence of species or places at anything more than local scale. This latter challenge is rapidly being addressed through a new generation of culturomic metrics that takes advantage of publicly available digital content. Here, we suggest that one such metric, estimated frequency of webpages that mention the scientific names of a species, broadly reflects the relative prominence of a species in global culture. Using all extant bird species as a case study, we demonstrate that species that are mentioned at high frequency on the global internet: (a) were scientifically described earlier, (b) have wide geographic ranges that overlap with technologically advanced societies, (c) are phenotypically conspicuous and (d) are strongly associated with direct human interactions (e.g. hunting). These results support the use of estimates of scientific name frequency on the internet as a proxy of a species' cultural salience, especially with respect to urban populations in technologically advanced societies. We conclude by discussing how a new generation of digital tools might be developed to support conservation monitoring and communication. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Keywords

• birds
• cultural value
• culturomics
• digital methods
• human–nature interactions