Image credit: Jordan Kraft
Whether or not humans are growing increasingly distanced from nature is a perennially popular question in our technological age. Actually measuring changes in this supposed distance poses a thorny challenge.
Past researchers have measured the proportion of “nature-related words” in song lyrics, without asking whether this is a good proxy for a society’s attitudes towards nature to begin with. Others have compared the ability of 4-7 year-olds to identify plant and animal species versus various Pokemon (seriously, why?).
Taking a big data approach, an international team of researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham and Ben-Gurion recently published a study whose encouraging results come without many of the subjectivity pitfalls of past efforts.
Using 2.33 billion Wikipedia pageview records over the span of 3 years and across 245 languages, the team saw that what happens in the natural world affects what people search for online.
Specifically, they saw that people’s online interest in plants and animals changed with the seasons. For instance, searches for flowering plants showed much stronger seasonal trends than those for coniferous trees, which are largely evergreen.
This seasonality is directly relevant to conservationists. Predictable spikes in interest provide clear opportunities to maximize the impact of environmental fundraising campaigns. They also provide a good starting point to understand what drives such interest. Put together, these data could help conservationists understand both when and how to best target their campaigns.
Two trends in the data help to understand drivers of seasonal interest. First, they noted that seasonality corresponded with the languages used in searches. Higher latitudes experience greater seasonal changes. The languages spoken there, such as Norwegian and Finnish turn up more seasonal searches for plant and animal species, than did searches in languages from tropical latitudes without great seasonal changes, such as Thai.
Second, they noticed that seasonal patterns often corresponded to cultural events, such as annual holidays. Wild turkey during Thanksgiving in the United States, for instance, or sharks during Shark Week.
In the words of lead author and University of Oxford PhD student John Mittermeier: “To see that online activity often correlates strongly with natural phenomena suggests that people are paying attention to the world around them, and from a conservation perspective that is really exciting.”
It’s also exciting to see how people use their “artificial” world to interact with the “natural” one.