Measuring human-nature interactions across digital platforms—an example from Israeli wildflowers

Human-nature interactions are ubiquitous and are commonly represented in the digital realm. Here, we aim to harness the rapidly accumulating wealth of new digital data sources and demonstrate that using multiple digital sources can help better understand societal aspects of biodiversity conservation. We explored different digital data platforms, including social media platforms, search engines, online encyclopedias, popular media articles, large online scientific databases, and citizen science platforms. These sources can represent different types of engagement people have with nature by different sectors of society. We assessed and compared the salience of 53 wildflower species in Israel across these digital sources as a test case. We found that different digital platforms highlight different species. Importantly, different platforms focused differently on a) narrow versus wide-ranging species, b) species found in locations that are closer or further away from roads, c) different plant growth forms, d) protected versus non-protected species, and e) endangered versus non-endangered species. These results suggest people have different engagements with nature, in different locations, across different digital data sources. We further show different relationships between salience across the different platforms. For example, the social media platform Flickr highlights unique species not represented in any other platform. Overall, our exploration of digital salience towards wildflowers in Israel demonstrates the importance of analysing multiple digital sources to allow for a more inclusive representation of the public and to better reflect species’ cultural importance online.