Press coverage and public perception of crested porcupines in urban and rural areas of Italy

Abstract

Amongst species well-adapted to urban environments, crested porcupines are increasingly encountering humans in cities, creating a need to understand public attitudes towards this species. If – on one side – porcupines are attractive and charismatic because of their unmistakable aspect, on the other side their closeness may trigger conflicts with humans, as being regarded as a crop pest. In this work we applied a sentiment analysis to test the general perception towards this large-sized rodent in urban areas. In this work, we analyzed 73 articles from 16 major Italian newspapers. We employed a mixed approach for sentiment analysis: human classification (positive, negative or neutral) and automatic emotion recognition using a lexicon. Sentiment analysis revealed a varied public perception: 43 % negative, 41 % positive, and 16 % neutral. News coverage primarily focused on encounters in human-dominated environments, with urban areas being the most frequent setting. Media attention on crested porcupines surged in recent years, especially focusing on their increasing presence in human-dominated environments. Social perception reflected the dualism between the surprise of detecting this species in urban areas, and the potential conflicts which may arise, without a net prevalence of either positive or negative attitudes toward the species. Our work represents a reproducible approach to tackle the complexity of human-wildlife coexistence in urban areas, besides shedding light on the importance of including media coverage and public perception within the human dimension of wildlife conservation, particularly in urban areas.