Wildlife searches for ‘wild turkey’ on Wikipedia spike in spring and fall, research shows

A version of this story originally appeared at the environmental news site Mongabay by staff writer Shreya Dasgupta. Follow her on Twitter @ShreyaDasupta.

What kinds of animals and plants are people interested in? When does their interest spike? Wikipedia may hold some answers, according to the findings of a 2019 study.

As a free and open-access digital source of information, the Wikipedia universe has a lot to offer. There’s the encyclopedia-like Wikipedia platform most of us are familiar with, one that we interact with when we’re reading about, say, salamanders or gorillas. All of Wikipedia’s data in turn are stored in a structured database within Wikidata.

Researchers are now digging into this database to answer some broader conservation-related questions.

One question that John Mittermeier, an ornithologist and doctoral student at the University of Oxford in the U.K., had was to see if Wikipedia could be used to measure public interest in different species. He wanted to look at not just what species people searched for most frequently, but also when they searched for it, and how their interests varied across different animal and plant groups.

To find out, Mittermeier and his colleagues analyzed 2.3 billion page views for pages corresponding to nearly 32,000 species across 245 Wikipedia language editions. Each page view can be thought of as a human-wildlife interaction, Mittermeier said, “if you count a click as an interaction.”

The researchers found that page views for more than a quarter of the species showed seasonal patterns, and the seasonal trends varied across different language pages.

For example, page views on English-language Wikipedia for three migratory birds — the Baltimore oriole (Icterus galbula), indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea) and rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus) — showed a strong peak during spring. This coincides with the birds’ arrival at breeding grounds in the United States, the researchers say.

In contrast, page views for tropical birds like the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) and the keel-billed toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus), that are not found in the U.S., did not show any consistent seasonality in the English-language editions.

“If you compare with the tropical species, that is, species that don’t overlap with where most English-speaking Wikipedia users are, they don’t show this seasonal pattern,” Mittermeier told Mongabay. “So what that’s telling us is that the presence of a species in a certain area does a lot to trigger interest in it. And I think that’s cool because that shows that people are paying attention to things.”

The researchers also found that page views for the species-related pages showed a lot more seasonality than random, non-species-related pages. This, Mittermeier said, suggests that wildlife and species are something we tend to interact with in a more seasonal way than other aspects of our life.

“Seasonal natural spectacles such as animal migration or exotic displays associated with reproductive behavior have fascinated humans for ages, but as societies become increasingly disconnected from nature, for example, due to urbanization and technological developments, attention towards such events could be expected to wane,” said Ricardo Correia, a conservation biologist at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, who was not part of the study. “The results of this study indicate otherwise and encouragingly suggest that humans remain attuned to the seasonal dynamics of the natural world.”

The study also identified some links to cultural events. Page views on English-language Wikipedia for the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), for instance, remained relatively stable throughout the year, but showed a peak around the time when the Discovery Channel aired “Shark Week.”

Similarly, page views for wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) showed two peaks: one during Thanksgiving in the U.S., and another in spring. The spring peak occurs around the same time as the hunting season for wild turkey in many U.S. states.

This was surprising, Mittermeier said. “Despite the fact that I have an ornithology and conservation background, I wouldn’t have guessed that wild turkeys get more online interest in spring than they do in the summer,” he said. With this information, if someone wanted to do things like, say, design a campaign to try and raise awareness, they could ride this natural peak, Mittermeier added.

There were differences in seasonality of page views across different languages, too. Wikipedia pages of species in languages that are mostly spoken at higher latitudes, such as Finnish or Norwegian, had more seasonality in page views of species-related pages than languages mostly spoken at lower latitudes, such as Hindi, Thai or Indonesian.

“That was also something I didn’t expect to see at all,” Mittermeier said. “We know that higher latitudes are more seasonal in their phenology and to see that reflected in language tells us something about people’s interaction with natural environment driving online activity.”

But pinpointing the exact cause of these patterns, which can be a complex mix of biological or cultural factors and differences in the structure of Wikipedia, isn’t going to be easy.

“As a scientist, we naturally want to dig into the causation, but in reality at this kind of scale you can’t answer that question all the time,” Mittermeier said. “I think that’s one of the challenges of these types of big data analyses in general. We’re seeing these big correlations that definitely tell you something but if we really want to understand individual causation then we’ll have to dig into them individually.”

However, identifying patterns of when, where and how people interact with nature can be a good start. These trends can help guide conservation education and marketing campaigns, for example.

“Really widespread, accurate monitoring of all the world’s species is still science fiction, unfortunately,” said Richard Grenyer, an associate professor of biodiversity and biogeography at the University of Oxford. “But by using these big data approaches we can begin to shortcut some of the more difficult problems, and cut to the core questions in modern conservation: how is the world changing, for which species is it changing the most, and where are the people who care the most and can do the most to help.”

Using digital methods to explore human connections with nature to benefit conservation — a nascent field termed “conservation culturomics” — has great potential, said Correia, who is part of the Conservation Culturomics (ConsCult) Working Group of the Society for Conservation Biology.

“In this light, I believe this study will make a lasting contribution to the field conceptually, but also in terms of its methodological contribution,” Correia added. “I look forward for future studies to take advantage of the analytical framework used here and expand our understanding of seasonal dynamics of human interest in nature.”