Ricardo Correia

University of Turku | UTU · Biodiversity Unit

Culturomics is an emerging field of study that seeks to understand human culture through the quantitative analysis of changes in word frequencies in large bodies of digital texts. Culturomics research can help nature conservation respond to cultural trends, building and reinvigorating its societal relevance. We identify five areas where culturomics...

Digital data are accumulating at unprecedented rates. These contain a lot of information about the natural world, some of which can be used to answer key ecological questions. Here, we introduce iEcology (i.e., internet ecology), an emerging research approach that uses diverse online data sources and methods to generate insights about species distr...

Ongoing loss of biological diversity is primarily the result of unsustainable human behavior. Thus, the long‐term success of biodiversity conservation depends on a thorough understanding of human–nature interactions. Such interactions are ubiquitous but vary greatly in time and space and are difficult to monitor efficiently at large spatial scales....

There is growing evidence that interacting and connecting with nature are essential to maintain human health and well‐being. The benefits of specific nature experiences and the cultural ecosystem services they provide are increasingly being recognized, but many others remain to be discovered and explored. In this perspective piece, I argue that the...

Online digital data from media platforms have the potential to complement biodiversity monitoring efforts. We propose a strategy for integrating these data into current biodiversity datasets in light of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Background The extinction of species is a multifaceted phenomenon shaped by the complex interplay between biological and socio-cultural factors. Public and academic preferences for different species often play a direct or indirect role in influencing the conservation outlook of these species. The “charisma” of species and other components of biodiv...

Biodiversity conservation continues to be a global priority and insights into societal interest and support for targeted species conservation actions are essential for their success. Taking advantage of emerging culturomics methods, here we propose a new methodology for mapping societal interest towards terrestrial mammals by combining the IUCN Red...

National Parks (NPs) and other protected areas in sub‐Saharan Africa are crucial in attracting international tourists interested in wildlife tourism, contributing to national economies. Despite their cultural, economic, and conservation significance, these areas face diverse development threats, leading to pressures for protected area downgrading,...

Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased towards the Global North. Incorporating social media data can complement existing gaps, especially in megadiverse countries with limited records, but whether such data can significantly improve our understanding of range-shifting species is unknown. Here, we collated lo...

1. Many invasive alien species gradually become embedded within local cultures. Such species can increasingly be perceived by society as familiar and native elements of the social-ecological system and as integral parts of local cultures. 2. Here, we explore this phenomenon and define it as cultural inception. Cultural inception can greatly hinder...

Understanding societal interest in invasive species is crucial as greater public attention can support the success of conservation efforts. One of the main challenges in monitoring societal interest to support conservation is the absence of near-real-time indicators to track large-scale spatiotemporal dynamics of public attention. However, the digi...

Here, we explore the first preprints uploaded to EcoEvoRxiv to characterise preprint practices in ecology and evolution. We aim to understand: 1) in what countries authors who use EcoEvoRxiv are located; 2) the taxonomic diversity of study systems across preprints; 3) whether preprint server use depends on career stage and gender; 4) the extent to...

Protected areas (PAs) play a vital role in the conservation of natural and cultural heritage while supporting local livelihoods. However, in Brazil, where limited resources and poor effectiveness lead to negative sentiments and are leveraged as criticism towards PAs, it is necessary to better comprehend public perceptions of Brazilian PAs and ident...

Deep learning has advanced the content analysis of digital data, unlocking opportunities for detecting, mapping, and monitoring invasive species. Here, we tested the ability of open source classification and object detection models (i.e., convolutional neural networks: CNNs) to identify and map the invasive plant Cortaderia selloana (pampas grass)...

Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to public interest in nature and conservation. Here, we use the micro-blogging social network Twitter to explore trends in public interest in Brazilian protected areas (PAs). We identified ~400,000 Portuguese language tweets pertaining to al...

Online wildlife trade is widespread and affects thousands of species. Yet, attempts to quantify online wildlife trade have mainly focused on a few platforms and taxonomic groups. Here, we study the prevalence of wildlife trade using automated data collection and filtering methods. We analyze trade across five digital platforms and 156 animal and pl...

Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relat...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega‐populated country, we examined the im...

Aim Online reptile trade poses new challenges to species conservation and requires automated monitoring. Range‐restricted and endemic reptile species are especially vulnerable to wildlife trade and unsustainable exploitation. In this study, we investigated the magnitude and geographic distribution of online trade of 96 endemic and range‐restricted...

Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relat...

Human responses to impending extinctions are complex, highly dependent on cultural and socioeconomic context, and have typically been far less studied than the ecological and genetic aspects of extinction. Specifically, the way in which science and societies respond to population decline, extirpation, and species extinction can also have a profound...

Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relat...

Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relat...

Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relat...

Human relationships with nature may sometimes manifest through fear, disgust and other disease‐avoidance mechanisms. While there is an evolutionary utility to these so‐called ‘biophobias’, many people exhibit phobic responses towards organisms that pose no tangible threats, potentially leading to excessive anxiety and avoidance of interactions with...

The lack of robust and timely data continues to be a limiting factor in the capacity to monitor progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Developing indicators based on big data has been proposed as a suitable approach to overcome this challenge but such developments have largely focused on earth observation data. Di...

Societal awareness of, and engagement with, environmental problems is a critical prerequisite for effective conservation programs. Research has revealed a strong general pattern whereby public attention received by cultural products diminishes over time. If transposed to conservation, this transience of societal attention is likely to be of major i...

The first target of the Convention for Biological Diversity (Aichi target 1) was to increase public awareness of the values of biodiversity and actions needed to conserve it—a key prerequisite for other conservation targets. Monitoring success in achieving this target at a global scale has been difficult; however, increased digitization of human li...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examin...

We argue that naming species in honour of a specific person is unjustifiable and out of step with equality and representation. Reforming taxonomy to remove eponyms will not be easy but could bring multiple benefits for both conservation and society.

E-commerce has become a booming market for wildlife trafficking, as online platforms are increasingly more accessible and easier to navigate by sellers, while still lacking adequate supervision. Artificial intelligence models, and specifically deep learning, have been emerging as promising tools for the automated analysis and monitoring of digital...

in press in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2598). Citation: Jarić, I., Correia, R.A., Bonaiuto, M., Brook, B.W., Courchamp, F., Firth, J.A., Gaston, K.J., Heger, T., Jeschke, J.M., Ladle, R.J., Meinard, Y., Roberts, D.L., Sherren, K., Soga, M., Soriano-Redondo, A., Veríssimo, D. and Roll, U. (2023). Transience...

Traditionally managed wood-pastures are undergoing changes driven by opposite trends related to the intensification of land exploitation resulting in degradation and loss of habitat or the abandonment of regular, non-intensive management. Wood-pasture intensification often reduces taxonomic and functional diversity with negative effects on ecosyste...

En la península ibérica se prevé un aumento de la aridez con el cambio climático que, en el ciclo anual, se percibe principalmente a partir del final de la primavera. Este aumento de la aridez puede representar para las aves esteparias una limitación temprana de los recursos tróficos, afectando a la estructura de su hábitat y, en consecuencia, redu...

Social media data is a rich source of information to assess human activities in catastrophic events. Here, we use social media data to understand how the 2019 Brazilian oil spill influenced social attitudes. Data were collected from the globally popular Instagram platform between August 1, 2019 and March 1, 2020. First, we manually identified the 5...

Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to the public interest in nature and conservation. Here, we use the micro-blogging social network Twitter to explore trends in public interest in Brazilian protected areas (PAs). We identified ~400,000 Portuguese language tweets pertaining t...

Taxonomic and aesthetic biases permeate biodiversity conservation. We used the LIFE program-the European Union's funding scheme for the environment-to explore the economic dimension of biases in species-and habitat-level conservation. Between 1992 and 2020, animal species received three times more funding than plants. Within plants, species at nort...

In August 2019, the Northeast coast of Brazil was impacted by an extensive oil spill, with immediate effects on marine and coastal ecosystems and signifi cant impacts on tourism and food security. The human dimension of those impacts also includes the loss of cultural ecosystem services (CES); the non-material benefi ts stemming from strongly roote...

The first target of the Convention for Biological Diversity aimed to increase public awareness towards the values of biodiversity and actions needed to conserve it - a key prerequisite for conservation support. Nevertheless, monitoring success in achieving this target is difficult. Here, we used Google search volume data to evaluate interest in bio...

Fisheries are among the human activities that are most strongly affected by ongoing climate-related changes in the presence and abundance of fish species across the globe. The ecological and social repercussions of such changes for recreational fisheries are however still poorly understood. Here, we compare selected ecological and social dimensions...

The ongoing global biodiversity crisis not only involves biological extinctions, but also the loss of experience and the gradual fading of cultural knowledge and collective memory of species. We refer to this phenomenon as 'societal extinction of species' and apply it to both extinct and extant taxa. We describe the underlying concepts as well as t...

Ongoing biodiversity loss represents the erosion of intrinsic value of living nature, reduces the contributions nature provides to people, and undermines efforts to move towards sustainability. We introduce conservation geography as the subfield of conservation science that studies where, when, and what conservation actions should be implemented in...

We highlight important steps that researchers should follow when using social media data, in particular when the aim of their research is to characterize illegal fishing. Specifically, we provide a checklist of mitigation strategies focusing on data privacy concerns and ethical principles associated with human-subject research. We hope our reflecti...

Fisheries are among the human activities that are most strongly affected by ongoing climate-related changes in the presence and abundance of fish species across the globe. The ecological and social repercussions of such changes for recreational fisheries are however still poorly understood. Here, we explore selected ecological and social dimensions...

Protected areas (PAs) are often seen as opportunity costs and are therefore vulnerable to political decisions that open them up to public or private development initiatives. We reasoned that, ceteris paribus, PAs with high levels of public support should be more resilient to such decisions because; i) politicians in democratic societies are relucta...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are benefits that people receive from ecosystems, for example, through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. These are important contributors to human well-being, but are challenging to measure due to their intangible nature and because they may vary spatially depending...

Interactions with nature promote key human health benefits and help inform sound conservation actions. During the COVID-19 lockdowns such interactions were reduced and, in many cases, limited to urban nature. Nevertheless, home-confinement regulations may have provided the impetus for people to reconnect with urban wildlife –through their windows,...

Wood-pastures are socio-ecological systems covering vast areas in Europe. Although used for grazing and production of various forest goods, wood-pastures harbour a rich biodiversity and are usually considered as High Nature Value Farmlands. However, socio-economic pressures are driving the transformation of these valuable landscapes from multi-func...

Troumbis, 2021 identifies three main challenges/criticisms with our article that we will respond to in turn. First, they suggest that there is a "semantic circularity entrapment" of findings reported and conclusions drawn. Notwithstanding the somewhat confusing phrasing of this criticism , it is undoubtedly correct to highlight the circular reasoni...

Wildlife trade, when unsustainable, can be an important threat to biodiversity conservation. In this contribution, we explored the use of digital data to investigate the online market for songbirds in Indonesia, where keeping pet songbirds is a deeply rooted cultural practice. We examined the spatial characteristics of three dimensions of the songb...

Protected Areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation action and the most effective strategy for conserving the Earth’s biodiversity. Nevertheless, there is evidence that PAs are increasingly viewed by politicians and policy-makers as opportunity costs that constrain economic development. In the absence of societal resistance (‘push-back...

In our paper “No visit, no interest: How COVID-19 has affected public interest in world's national parks” (Souza et al., 2021) we use culturomic data and methods to provide a global overview of internet search interest in national parks during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis highlighted steep and widespread declines in searches for...

Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation policy and have expanded dramatically over the last century. Though unequivocally beneficial for biodiversity, gazetting land for protecting nature can also be seen as an 'opportunity cost' that some politicians are unwilling to pay. One of the most effective strategies to increase th...

Introduction Biological invasions are a major threat to global biodiversity and can have substantial socioeconomic costs. Although invasive non–native species have been studied extensively, their monitoring and management are often inadequate (Pergl et al. 2020). Moreover, the great harm invasive non–native species cause tends to be underestimated...

The recent growth of online big data offers opportunities for rapid and inexpensive measurement of public interest. Conservation culturomics is an emerging research area that uses online data to study human–nature relationships for conservation. Methods for conservation culturomics, though promising, are still being developed and refined. We consid...

The World Wide Web became broadly available in August 1991, ushering in the Information Age and catalyzing profound changes in almost every aspect of human endeavor. This new age is characterized by online connectivity, real‐time interactions, and the convergence of information and communication technology, institutions, people, and processes (Cast...

Large body size, the defining characteristic of “charismatic megafauna,” is often viewed as the most significant correlate of higher public interest in species. However, common, local species (many of which are not large) can also generate public interest. We explored the relative importance of body size versus local occurrence in patterns of onlin...

The widespread activity of recreational hunting is proposed as a means of conserving nature and supporting livelihoods. However, recreational hunting-especially trophy hunting-has come under increasing scrutiny based on ethical concerns and the arguments that it can threaten species and fail to contribute meaningfully to local livelihoods. We provi...

Wildlife trade, when unsustainable, can be an important threat to biodiversity conservation. In this contribution, we explored the use of digital data to investigate the online market for songbirds in Indonesia, where keeping pet songbirds is a deeply rooted cultural practice. We examined the spatial characteristics of three dimensions of the songb...

iEcology and conservation culturomics are two emerging research approaches that rely on digital data for studying ecological patterns and human-nature interactions. We applied data mining of videos published on YouTube related to recreational fishing of four species of groupers (family: Epinephelidae) in Italy between 2011 and 2017 to learn whether...

The use of digital content has become a powerful tool to evaluate and track macro-scale trends in human-nature relations. This is an emerging field of study known as conservation culturomics, that seeks to understand human culture through quantitative analysis in large bodies of digital content. Here, we used relative search volume on Google Search...

Environmental filtering has been defined as the effect of environmental gradients on species in a plant community and can be the dominant driver of community assembly. Here, we evaluate the relationship between plant communities and the environment in the Restinga vegetation. For this, we measured 11 functional traits of plant species present along...

Through the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC) and the financial investments of the LIFE projects, Europe has become an experimental arena for biological conservation. With an estimated annual budget of €20 billion, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 has set an ambitious goal of classifying 30% of its land and sea territory as Protected Areas and en...