Evaluating the reliability of media reports for gathering information about illegal wildlife trade seizures

Exploring the potential for online data sources to enhance species threat mapping through the case study of global bat exploitation

Expanding digital data sources, including social media and online news, provide a low-cost way to examine human-nature interactions, such as wildlife exploitation. However, the extent to which using such data sources can expand or bias understanding of the distribution and intensity of threats has not been comprehensively assessed. To address this gap, we quantified the geographical and temporal distribution of online sources documenting the hunting and trapping, consumption, or trade of bats (Chiroptera) and compared these with the distribution of studies obtained from a systematic literature search and species listed as threatened by exploitation on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. Online records were collected using automated searches of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Bing and were filtered using machine classification. This yielded 953 relevant social media posts and web pages, encompassing 1099 unique records of bat exploitation from 84 countries. Although the number of records per country was significantly predicted by the number of academic studies per country, online records provided additional locations and more recent records of bat exploitation, including 22 countries not present in academic literature. This demonstrates the value of online resources in providing more complete geographical representation. However, confounding variables can bias the analysis of spatiotemporal trends. Online bat exploitation records showed peaks in 2020 and 2014, after accounting for increases in internet users through time. The second of these peaks could be attributed to the COVID-19 outbreak, and speculation about the role of bats in its epidemiology, rather than to true changes in exploitation. Overall, our results showed that data from online sources provide additional knowledge on the global extent of wildlife exploitation, which could be used to identify early warnings of emerging threats and pinpoint locations for further research.

Concerned or Apathetic? Using Social Media Platform (Twitter) to Gauge the Public Awareness about Wildlife Conservation: A Case Study of the Illegal Rhino Trade

The illegal wildlife trade is resulting in worldwide biodiversity loss and species’ extinction. It should be exposed so that the problems of conservation caused by it can be highlighted and resolutions can be found. Social media is an effective method of information dissemination, providing a real-time, low-cost, and convenient platform for the public to release opinions on wildlife protection. This paper aims to explore the usage of social media in understanding public opinions toward conservation events, and illegal rhino trade is an example. This paper provides a framework for analyzing rhino protection issues by using Twitter. A total of 83,479 useful tweets and 33,336 pieces of users’ information were finally restored in our database after filtering out irrelevant tweets. With 2422 records of trade cases, this study builds up a rhino trade network based on social media data. The research shows important findings: (1) Tweeting behaviors are somewhat affected by the information of traditional mass media. (2) In general, countries and regions with strong negative sentiment tend to have high volume of rhino trade cases, but not all. (3) Social celebrities’ participation in activities arouses wide public concern, but the influence does not last for more than a month. NGOs, GOs, media, and individual enterprises are dominant in the dissemination of information about rhino trade. This study contributes in the following ways: First, this paper conducts research on public opinions toward wildlife conservation using natural language processing technique. Second, this paper offers advice to governments and conservationist organizations, helping them utilize social media for protecting wildlife.