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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2020.08.17.254177

The Species Awareness Index (SAI): a Wikipedia-derived conservation culturomics metric for public biodiversity awareness

Millard, J. W.·Gregory, R. D.·Jones, K.·Freeman, R.
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Abstract

Threats to global biodiversity are well-known, but slowing currents rates of biodiversity loss remains an ongoing challenge. The Aichi Targets set out 20 goals on which the international community should act to alleviate biodiversity decline, one of which (Target 1) aimed to raise public awareness of the importance of biodiversity. Whilst conventional indicators for Target 1 are of low spatial and temporal coverage, conservation culturomics has demonstrated how biodiversity awareness can be quantified at the global scale. Following the Living Planet Index methodology, here we introduced the Species Awareness Index (SAI), an index of changing species awareness on Wikipedia. We calculated this index at the page level for 41,197 IUCN species across 10 Wikipedia languages, incorporating over 2 billion views. Bootstrapped indices for the page level SAI show that overall awareness of biodiversity is marginally increasing, although there are differences among taxonomic classes and languages. Among taxonomic classes, overall awareness of reptiles is increasing fastest, and amphibians slowest. Among languages, overall species awareness for the Japanese Wikipedias is increasing fastest, and the Chinese and German Wikipedias slowest. Although awareness of species on Wikipedia as a whole is increasing, and is significantly higher in traded species, over the period 2016-2020 change in interest appears not to be strongly related to the trade of species or animal pollinators. As a data source for public biodiversity awareness Wikipedia could be integrated into the Biodiversity Engagement Indicator, thereby incorporating a more direct link to biodiversity itself.

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Millard, J. W., Gregory, R. D., Jones, K., Freeman, R.. 2020-08-20. The Species Awareness Index (SAI): a Wikipedia-derived conservation culturomics metric for public biodiversity awareness. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.17.254177

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