What can conservation culturomics tell us about factors driving public interest in aquatic endangered species

Abstract

The field of “Conservation Culturomics” uses large datasets of freely available web-data to understand cultural patterns and public interests related to conservation topics. We used a popular culturomics tool based on search engine usage to investigate how the U.S. Endangered Species Act listing actions may influence public interest in imperiled freshwater taxa. Yet questions remain regarding the acceptable applications of these data leading us to also evaluate aspects of data quality such as repeatability of timeseries and spatial relative search volume (RSV) data for our search terms. We discovered that low search volume for many freshwater species restricted the number of species that could be analyzed and may signal low public awareness for these species. Low repeatability of timeseries relative search volume data suggests that greater scrutiny and quality control methods may be needed when analyzing these data. For species that had the highest data repeatability, there were positive associations of listing actions and relative search volume for threatened and endangered species. Anomalous peaks of search volume were sometimes but not always related to listing actions or online news stories. Spatial analysis indicated that search volumes were highest in states within species' native ranges suggesting that people are most interested in species that occur near where they live.