Combining culturomic datasets to assess the potential for digital monitoring of cross-cultural progress towards Aichi Target 1

Abstract

Assessing public interest in nature is one of the key areas where culturomics shows great potential to contribute towards conservation science and practice. For example, internet search volume data has been suggested as a potential tool for measuring progress towards Aichi Target 1, which states that ‘by 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably’. The underlying assumption of such an approach Would be that changes in internet search volume, generally considered a metric of public interest, would generally reflect changes in public awareness of biodiversity. However, this assumption holds true only if searches for biodiversity related content result in a similar volume of web-content ‘consumption’. In other words, interest – “the feeling of wanting to know or learn about something or someone” – in biodiversity does not necessarily result in increased awareness – “knowledge or perception of a situation or fact”. Here we aim to provide a first assessment of the relationship between these two dimensions across 15 language groups by combining two separate datasets: search volume data obtained from Google Trends and language-specific page views to Wikipedia’s biodiversity page. Wikipedia is one of the most popular web domains across the world and generally ranks among top search engine results, making it a potentially suitable resource for this purpose. Specifically, we i) assess the correlation between search volume and page views for a period of 2.5 years; ii) explore how socio-cultural factors relate to changes in this relationship; and, iii) test for differences between the trends observed for each dataset. Results show that correlation scores between search volume and page views vary greatly between languages (0.46-0.96), and are positively associated with the relative popularity of the Wikipedia page but negatively associated with the number of countries where the language is spoken. Interestingly, the relative quality of the Wikipedia page for different languages showed no significant association with correlation scores. Finally, we show that search volume and page views show significantly different trends for some language groups during the same period raising questions regarding the capacity of each dataset to measure interest in biodiversity individually. While future analyses should expand the set of terms explored to further validate such an approach, this work exposes the pros and cons of individual datasets and how future applications of culturomic approaches to conservation topics may greatly benefit from increasing integration of independent datasets.