The species awareness index as a conservation culturomics metric for public biodiversity awareness

Although threats to global biodiversity are well known, slowing current rates of biodiversity loss remains a challenge. The Aichi targets set out 20 goals on which the international community should act to alleviate biodiversity decline, 1 of which (Target 1) aims to raise public awareness of the importance of biodiversity. Although conventional indicators for Target 1 are of low spatial and temporal coverage, conservation culturomics metrics show how biodiversity awareness can be quantified at the global scale. Following methods used for the Living Planet Index, we devised a species awareness index (SAI) to measure change in species awareness based on Wikipedia views. We calculated this index at the page level for 41,197 species listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) across 10 Wikipedia languages and >2 billion views from 1 July 2015 to 30 March 2020. Bootstrapped indices for the page‐level SAI showed that overall awareness of biodiversity increased marginally over time, although there were differences among taxonomic classes and languages. Among taxonomic classes, overall awareness increased fastest for reptiles and slowest for amphibians. Among languages, overall species awareness increased fastest for Japanese and slowest for Chinese and German users. Although awareness of species as a whole increased and was significantly higher for traded species, from January 2016 through January 2020, change in awareness appeared not to be strongly related to whether the species is traded or is a pollinator. As a data source for public biodiversity awareness, the SAI could be integrated into the Conservation International Biodiversity Engagement Indicator. El Índice de Sensibilización de Especie como Medida de Culturomia de la Conservación para la Sensibilización Pública por la Biodiversidad Resumen Aunque las amenazas a la biodiversidad mundial son bien conocidas, reducir las tasas actuales de pérdida de la biodiversidad todavía es un desafío. Los objetivos de Aichi establecieron 20 metas para las cuales debe actuar la comunidad internacional para aliviar la declinación de la biodiversidad. Una de estas metas (Objetivo 1) busca sensibilizar al público sobre la importancia de la biodiversidad. Aunque los indicadores convencionales del Objetivo 1 tienen una baja cobertura espacial y temporal, las medidas de culturomia para la conservación muestran cómo la sensibilización por la biodiversidad puede cuantificarse a escala global. Seguimos