Species conservation is the driving force behind all of my work.
All of my expeditions have a conservation component, and many of them focus directly on trying to answer questions relevant to local and global conservation efforts. This includes searches for critically endangered, “lost” species, such as the moorhens in the Solomon Islands and Samoa, as well as population surveys of species such as the Moluccan Woodcock in eastern Indonesia. In other instances, such as in Cambodia, I have helped conduct surveys to find out which species occur in protected areas, information that can help inform policymakers.
Check out on the expedition pages if you’re curious about some of these specific projects.
Conservation culturomics
The success or failure of conservation frequently depends on public support, so it is important to understand the social aspects of conservation as well as the biological and ecological components. During my PhD, I studied patterns in what people search for online to see what these patterns can tell us about people’s attitudes towards wildlife. Using these online ‘big data,’ I examined patterns in billions of internet searches and pageviews from people in hundreds of different languages, some of the largest-scale analyses of human interest in biodiversity in history. I identified several intriguing patterns in these online data: for example, people’s online searches for some species follow seasonal patterns (see the graphs to the right).
Can you guess what the top 10 most popular reptiles in Wikipedia are? If you’re interested in learning the answer, and finding out more about conservation culturomics, I’ve linked some publications and media coverage of our findings below.
Learn more…
The webpage of the Society of Conservation Biology’s conservation culturomics working group explains more about the field and provides a list of papers: www.conservationculturomics.com.
McGowan, J., Beaumont, L.J., Smith, R., Chauvenet, A.L.M., Harcourt, R., Atkinson, S., Mittermeier, J.C., Esperon-Rodriguez, M., Baumgartner, J.B., Beattie, A., Dudaniec, R.Y., Grenyer, R., Nipperess, D., Stow, A., and H.P. Possingham. 2020. Conservation prioritization can resolve the flagship species conundrum. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14554-z
Mittermeier, J.C., Roll, U., Matthews, T.J., and R. Grenyer. 2019. A season for all things: phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. 2019. PLoS Biology doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146.
Dorward, L. J., J.C. Mittermeier, C. Sandbrook, and F. Spooner. 2016. Pokemon Go: Benefits, Costs, and Lessons for the Conservation Movement. Conservation Letters 10(1): 160-165.
Roll, U., J.C. Mittermeier, G.I. Diaz, M. Novosolov, A. Feldman, Y. Itescu, S. Meiri and R. Grenyer. 2016. Using Wikipedia page views to explore the cultural importance of global reptiles. Biological Conservation 204(A): 42-50.