Using social media records to inform conservation planning

11 pages, 3 figures, supporting information https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14161

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega-populated country, we examined the importance of social media records in conservation decision-making. We collated species distribution records for birds and butterflies from Facebook and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), grouped them into GBIF-only and combined GBIF and Facebook data, and investigated the differences in identifying critical conservation areas. Adding Facebook data to GBIF data improved the accuracy of systematic conservation planning assessments by identifying additional important conservation areas in the northwest, southeast, and central parts of Bangladesh, extending priority conservation areas by 4,000–10,000 km2. Community efforts are needed to drive the implementation of the ambitious Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets, especially in megadiverse tropical countries with a lack of reliable and up-to-date species distribution data. We highlight that conservation planning can be enhanced by including available data gathered from social media platforms

S.C. and A.B. gratefully acknowledge the support of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the sMon project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG-FZT 118, 202548816). R.A.C. acknowledges personal funding from the Academy of Finland (#348352) and the KONE Foundation (#202101976). V.S. is supported by a Ramón y Cajal research fellowship (RYC2021-033065-I) granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Queensland, as part of the Wiley - The University of Queensland agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians

With the institutional support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)

Peer reviewed