Nomenclature instability in species culturomic assessments: Why synonyms matter

Culturomics is an emerging area of study that explores human culture through the quantitative analysis of large digital bodies of text. Culturomics shows great potential for the study of public perceptions and engagement with nature and biodiversity, and thus to contribute to the assessment and monitoring of major conservation goals (e.g. Aichi Target 1). In order to realize the full potential of culturomic approaches for conservation applications, researchers must develop solutions for existing methodological issues. For example, the use of scientific binomial names in species assessments has been recently proposed as a means to account for linguistic challenges associated with vernacular names, such as synonyms and homonyms. However, scientific names can also be affected by scientific synonyms arising from changes in species nomenclature. Here, we focus on a culturomic assessment of internet content and evaluate the importance of considering scientific name synonyms in such assessments. For this, we estimated how much omitting taxonomic synonyms affected webpage retrieval for bird species. Results indicate that failing to consider synonyms affected the number of webpages retrieved for over half of the species considered. In some cases, such omissions were severe (over 50% of total webpages omitted) and increased with the number of synonyms identified. We discuss the challenges posed by the dynamic nature of taxonomy in efforts to evaluate public interest in species using culturomic approaches and suggest that future studies should always strive to identify and account for any existing synonyms to minimize potential problems.