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

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. A conservacAo a longo prazo so sera bem-sucedida se as pessoas apoiarem os objetivos de conservacAo. Embora muitos fatores possam influenciar o nivel desse apoio, e evidente que as pessoas estAo mais dispostas a conservar especies e lugares familiares que lhes proporcionam algo que valorizam. Ate agora, esta dimensAo esta faltando na pratica da conservacAo e tem lacunas na base de informacAo cientifica. Isto e compreensivel, dado o historico do foco dos cientistas da conservacAo na ecologia das populacoes e das comunidades, e as dificuldades praticas de avaliar a proeminencia cultural das especies ou dos lugares em escalas espaciais grandes. Este ultimo desafio esta sendo rapidamente abordado atraves de uma nova geracAo de metricas baseadas em culturomica (culturomics) que aproveitam a enorme quantidade de conteudo digital disponivel. Aqui, sugerimos que uma dessas metricas, a frequencia estimada de paginas da Web que mencionam os nomes cientificos de uma especie, reflita a proeminencia relativa de uma especie na cultura global. Usando todas as especies de aves existentes como um estudo de caso, demonstramos que as especies mencionadas em alta frequencia na Internet global: i) estAo entre as primeiras a serem cientificamente descritas; II) tem ampla distribuicAo geografica que se sobrepoem as sociedades tecnologicamente avancadas; III) sAo fenotipicamente distinto, e; IV) estAo fortemente associadas com interacoes diretas com os seres humanos (por exemplo, caca). Nossos resultados apoiam o uso de estimativas de frequencia de nomes cientificos na Internet como uma metrica da saliencia cultural de uma especie, especialmente no que diz respeito as populacoes urbanas em sociedades tecnologicamente avancadas. Concluimos discutindo como uma nova geracAo de ferramentas digitais baseadas em culturomics pode ser desenvolvida para apoiar o monitoramento e a comunicacAo da conservacAo. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.