0000000001326723
AUTHOR
Richard Ladle
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…
Species in the Virtual World: Culturomics meets Biogeography
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 …