Communications of the ACM
Harnessing Online Digital Data and AI to Monitor Biodiversity
Social media data has been used to identify instances of illegal wildlife trade, researchers say.
Credit: Enrico di Minin
"Images and comments that people post online can be used to infer changes on biodiversity," says Andrea Soriano-Redondo, a researcher at the University of Helsinki and lead-author of an article on the topic published in Plos Biology.
Scientists from the university and colleagues from other universities and institutions propose a strategy for integrating online digital data from media platforms to complement monitoring efforts to help address the global biodiversity crisis in light of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
"Online digital data, such as social media data, can be used to strengthen existing assessments of the status and trends of biodiversity, the pressures upon it, and the conservation solutions being implemented, as well as to generate novel insights about human-nature interactions," Soriano-Redondo says.
Online biodiversity data "can be filtered and processed by researchers to target specific research questions and are increasingly being used to explore ecological processes and to investigate the distribution, spatiotemporal trends, phenology, ecological interactions, or behavior of species or assemblages and their drivers of change," Soriano-Redondo says.
From University of Helsinki
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