Online Monitoring of Global Attitudes Towards Wildlife

31 Pages Posted: 29 Aug 2020

See all articles by Joss Wright

Joss Wright

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Robert Lennox

NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS

Diogo Veríssimo

University of Oxford

Date Written: July 22, 2020

Abstract

Human factors are increasingly recognised as central to conservation of biodiversity. Despite this, there are no existing systematic efforts to monitor global trends in perceptions of wildlife. With traditional news reporting now largely online, the internet presents a powerful means to monitor global attitudes towards species. In this work we develop a method using the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) to scan global news media, allowing us to identify and download conservation-related articles. Applying supervised machine learning techniques, we filter irrelevant articles to create a continually updated global dataset of news coverage for seven target taxa: lion, tiger, saiga, rhinoceros, pangolins, elephants, and orchids, and observe that over two-thirds of articles matching a simple keyword search were irrelevant. We examine coverage of each taxa in different regions, and find that elephants, rhinos, tigers, and lions receive the most coverage, with daily peaks of around 200 articles. Mean sentiment was positive for all taxa, except saiga for which it was neutral. Coverage was broadly distributed, with articles from 73 countries across all continents. Elephants and tigers received coverage in the most countries overall, whilst orchids and saiga were mentioned in the smallest number of countries. We further find that sentiment towards charismatic megafauna is most positive in non-range countries, with the opposite being true for pangolins and orchids. Despite promising results, there remain substantial obstacles to achieving globally representative results. Disparities in internet access between low and high income countries and users is a major source of bias, with the need to focus on a diversity of data sources and languages, presenting sizable technical challenges. Tackling these will depend on the development of more advanced natural language tools in a wildlife conservation context, as well as the development of systems to access more, and more diverse, data sources.

Suggested Citation

Wright, Joss and Lennox, Robert and Veríssimo, Diogo, Online Monitoring of Global Attitudes Towards Wildlife (July 22, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3658481 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3658481

Joss Wright (Contact Author)

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

Robert Lennox

NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS

Nygårdsgaten 112
Bergen, Vestland 5008
Norway

Diogo Veríssimo

University of Oxford ( email )

Mansfield Road
Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 4AU
United Kingdom

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