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

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 se…