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Assessing global popularity and threats to important bird and biodiversity areas using social media data
Citation
Hausmann, A and Toivonen, T and Fink, C and Heikinheimo, V and Tenkanen, H and Butchart, SHM and Brooks, TM and Di Minin, E, Assessing global popularity and threats to important bird and biodiversity areas using social media data, Science of the Total Environment, 683 pp. 617-623. ISSN 0048-9697 (2019) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
© 2019 The Authors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
DOI: doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.05.268
Abstract
Understanding worldwide patterns of human use of sites of international significance for biodiversity conservation is crucial for meeting global conservation targets. However, robust global datasets are scarce. In this study, we used social media data, mined from Flickr and Twitter, geolocated in Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs)to assess i)patterns of popularity; ii)relationships of this popularity with geographical and biological variables; and iii)identify sites under high pressure from visitors. IBAs located in Europe and Asia, and in temperate biomes, had the highest density of users. Sites of importance for congregatory species, which were also more accessible, more densely populated and provided more tourism facilities, received higher visitation than did sites richer in bird species. We found 17% of all IBAs assessed to be under very high threat also received high visitation. Our results show in which IBAs enhanced monitoring should be implemented to reduce potential visitation risks to sites of conservation concern for birds, and to harness the potential benefits of tourism for conservation.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | social media, biodiversity, big data, ecotourism, IBAs, threat |
| Research Division: | Environmental Sciences |
| Research Group: | Environmental management |
| Research Field: | Conservation and biodiversity |
| Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
| Objective Group: | Expanding knowledge |
| Objective Field: | Expanding knowledge in the environmental sciences |
| UTAS Author: | Brooks, TM (Dr Thomas Brooks) |
| ID Code: | 137816 |
| Year Published: | 2019 |
| Web of Science® Times Cited: | 14 |
| Deposited By: | Sustainable Marine Research Collaboration |
| Deposited On: | 2020-03-05 |
| Last Modified: | 2020-04-30 |
| Downloads: | 8 View Download Statistics |
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