Effect of IUCN Red List category on public attention to mammals.

Abstract

Cultural data is a powerful tool to analyze public awareness of key societal issues, including the conservation of nature. I used two publicly available repositories of cultural data, Google Trends and Google Ngram, to quantify the effect of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List conservation status on public attention toward 4539 mammal species. With Google Trends, I calculated whether Google searches for their common and scientific names have been increasing or decreasing over time. I also ran an anomaly detection analysis to investigate whether a change in red-list status directly results in an increase in Google searches. Additionally, I quantified the mentions of species' common and scientific names in English texts with Google Ngram. Overall, Google searches for most mammal species remained at similar levels or increased since 2008. The severity of species' IUCN Red List status was a significant predictor of increasing Google searches, although the effect size was relatively small. Red-list status seemed strongly confounded with mammal body size. Species that moved to a higher-risk category spiked significantly in Google searches directly after the new designation. The mention of species' common names in the Google Ngram's English 2019 corpus significantly increased as the red-list category increased. These results provide valuable insight into the importance of the IUCN Red List for increasing public awareness and the usefulness of publicly available cultural data on examining the effectiveness of specific conservation efforts and thus evaluating targets for support and funding.