Internet scientific name frequency as an indicator of cultural salience of biodiversity

Public interest in nature is an important driver of the success of conservation actions, such that increasing public awareness of biodiversity has become a major conservation goal (i.e. Aichi Target 1). Macro-scale monitoring of public interest towards nature has thus far been difficult, but the enormous quantity of information generated by the internet allows for new approaches using culturomic techniques. For example, other things being equal, we would expect that the vernacular (common) names of charismatic species with high levels of public interest (e.g. tiger, elephant) to appear on more web-pages than less ‘cultural’ species. Nevertheless, deriving metrics from such data is challenging because vernacular names often have multiple meanings (e.g. teal, jaguar) that could significantly bias culturomic metrics of cultural visibility. Scientific binomial names of species potentially avoid this problem because Latin is a ‘dead’ language and the scientific name typically applies only to the biological organism. Here, we investigate whether standard scientific names: i) are a robust proxy of web salience of vernacular species names, and; ii) have the same statistical relationship with vernacular species names across different cultural and language groups. Automated internet searches were carried out for scientific and vernacular names from a global bird species list and six national bird species lists (Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, Tanzania and USA). For national searches the results were restricted to country web domains. We found strong and consistent correlations between vernacular and scientific species names at both global and country level, independent of language and cultural differences. The universality of this relationship suggests that the web salience of scientific species names is a robust, cross-cultural indicator of species ‘culturalness’. Potential applications of this indicator include: i) the development of new indicators to assess public perceptions of biodiversity; ii) systematic identification of species with high cultural visibility; iii) empirical identification of the biogeographic, ecological, morphological and cultural characteristics of species that influence cultural visibility, globally and in different cultural settings, and; iv) near real-time monitoring of changes in species ‘culturalness’. The capture and processing of internet data is technically non-trivial, but can be replicated at low cost and has enormous potential for the creation of new macro-scale metrics of human-nature interactions.