A protocol for harvesting biodiversity data from Facebook

We present how to structure keywords, search for species photographs, and georeference localities for such records. We further highlight some challenges users might face when extracting species distribution data from Facebook and suggest solutions. Following our proposed framework, we present a case study on Bangladesh's biodiversity-a tropical megadiverse South Asian country. We scraped nearly 45,000 unique georeferenced records across 967 species and found a median of 27 records per species. About 12% of the distribution data were for threatened species, representing 27% of all species. We also obtained data for 56 DataDeficient species for Bangladesh. If carefully harvested, social media data can significantly reduce global biodiversity knowledge gaps. Consequently, developing an automated tool to extract and interpret social media biodiversity data is a research priority.PMID:38545678 | DOI:10.1111/cobi.14257

Source: Conservation Biology - March 28, 2024 Category: Biology Authors: Shawan Chowdhury Sultan Ahmed Shofiul Alam Corey T Callaghan Priyanka Das Moreno Di Marco Enrico Di Minin Ivan Jari ć Mahzabin Muzahid Labi Md Rokonuzzaman Uri Roll Valerio Sbragaglia Asma Siddika Aletta Bonn Source Type: research