Species in the Virtual World: Culturomics meets Biogeography

Abstract

Since the evolution of consciousness, animals and plants have been core components of mental models that humans use to make sense of the world. The species that populate these models inevitably include those that have become familiar through the direct interactions of individuals with the natural world. While modern urban living has severed much of our once intimate connection with non-human species, opportunities for surrogate interactions (in written or visual media) with nature have expanded beyond the imagination of our recent ancestors. Humans thus appear to be increasingly disengaging with wild nature, while simultaneously expanding the representation and documentation of the natural world into the virtual world of the internet. Nevertheless, digital representation of species is not random: it broadly reflects the interests, cultural history and intrinsic preferences of the individuals responsible for the generation of media content. In turn, this biased representation of species will influence the degree to which individuals become familiar with certain species (e.g. elephants or elephant shrews), driving the generation of further content and interactions in a positive feedback process. Beyond these simple generalities our understanding of what drives the differential representation of biological species in global culture is, at best, rudimentary. However, this may be about to change as culturomic methods provide scientists with an increasingly sophisticated and nuanced profile of cultural visibility and public interest in species at scales from national to global. In this presentation I outline the conceptual basis and current state of knowledge about the distribution and abundance (biogeography) of representations of biological species on the internet and discuss the potential applications of this exciting new area of research (1).

1. Ladle, R. J. et al. Conservation culturomics. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14, 269-275