Chai-allah, A. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

Decentralized social media for environmental research

Social media data are reshaping environmental research. However, recent ownership and policy changes on centralized platforms like Twitter/X have motivated many users to seek new alternatives while simultaneously accelerating data restrictions for scientists. Decentralized social media, particularly Bluesky and Mastodon, are emerging as alternatives for users seeking greater control over their data and as a more stable and sustainable source of data for researchers. This rise may be instrumental in revitalizing the role of social media in environmental research. This study aims to provide a first-of-its-kind analysis of the potential of these new sources for environmental research, demonstrating their potential usefulness through the examples of climate change discourses and people's appreciation of wildlife. We find an increased adoption of Mastodon and Bluesky, with high linguistic diversity, even if dominated by English. Wildlife image content reveals broad taxonomic diversity, with plants, birds, and insects dominating the records. We find this pattern broadly consistent with that observed on the popular citizen science platform iNaturalist. Climate change discourse is found to broadly reflect the scientific consensus on both platforms, with contrarian claims remaining uncommon. This suggests that researchers may benefit from less polarized opinions and misinformation, arising from interactions that are less driven by engagement maximizing algorithms implemented in other platforms. Our study illustrates the promise of decentralized social media as a new data source for environmental scientists and paves the way for their broader use in environmental research.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Powerful flowers: Public perception of grassland aesthetics is strongly related to management and biodiversity

Temperate grasslands provide various cultural ecosystem services that are appreciated in diverse ways. Capturing these diverse appreciations requires different methodological approaches, such as questionnaire surveys and social media analyses. In this study, we combined the potential of both approaches to capture two aspects of what people appreciate in agricultural grasslands, i.e., the aesthetic quality of differently managed plant communities and the objects frequently found in grassland-based social media images. The two complementary approaches showed that people preferred colourful flower- and species-rich grasslands over grass-dominated and fertilised swards. Social media analysis highlighted that people mainly photographed flowers, followed by livestock and/or wildlife, but this depended also on the social media platform used. In conclusion, peoples appreciation was clearly related to the intensity of grassland management and to the level of biodiversity, with a preference for extensively managed grasslands with diverse flowers and wildlife. Yet, we also found significant differences between (i) conservationists and agricultural professionals in the aesthetic appreciation of the plant communities, and (ii) between common visitors and naturalists in their social media content. Our results suggest that extensive management and ecological restoration can be used to increase cultural grassland ecosystem services by enhancing the richness of forbs, flowers and other attractive wildlife. Thus, targeted management is necessary to maintain and enhance the attractiveness of grassland landscapes and subsequently increase the health benefits that can be associated with these cultural grassland ecosystem services and human-nature contacts.

ecology↗