TY - JOUR
T1 - A season for all things
T2 - Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation
AU - Mittermeier, John C.
AU - Roll, Uri
AU - Matthews, Thomas J.
AU - Grenyer, Richard
N1 - Funding Information: JCM is supported by a Wilfrid Knapp Scholarship at St Catherine’s College. All authors acknowledge the efforts of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation in collecting and making available via public license the content, metadata, and pageview data on which this study depends.
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - Phenology plays an important role in many human-nature interactions, but these seasonal patterns are often overlooked in conservation. Here, we provide the first broad exploration of seasonal patterns of interest in nature across many species and cultures. Using data from Wikipedia, a large online encyclopedia, we analyzed 2.33 billion pageviews to articles for 31,751 species across 245 languages. We show that seasonality plays an important role in how and when people interact with plants and animals online. In total, over 25% of species in our data set exhibited a seasonal pattern in at least one of their language-edition pages, and seasonality is significantly more prevalent in pages for plants and animals than it is in a random selection of Wikipedia articles. Pageview seasonality varies across taxonomic clades in ways that reflect observable patterns in phenology, with groups such as insects and flowering plants having higher seasonality than mammals. Differences between Wikipedia language editions are significant; pages in languages spoken at higher latitudes exhibit greater seasonality overall, and species seldom show the same pattern across multiple language editions. These results have relevance to conservation policy formulation and to improving our understanding of what drives human interest in biodiversity.
AB - Phenology plays an important role in many human-nature interactions, but these seasonal patterns are often overlooked in conservation. Here, we provide the first broad exploration of seasonal patterns of interest in nature across many species and cultures. Using data from Wikipedia, a large online encyclopedia, we analyzed 2.33 billion pageviews to articles for 31,751 species across 245 languages. We show that seasonality plays an important role in how and when people interact with plants and animals online. In total, over 25% of species in our data set exhibited a seasonal pattern in at least one of their language-edition pages, and seasonality is significantly more prevalent in pages for plants and animals than it is in a random selection of Wikipedia articles. Pageview seasonality varies across taxonomic clades in ways that reflect observable patterns in phenology, with groups such as insects and flowering plants having higher seasonality than mammals. Differences between Wikipedia language editions are significant; pages in languages spoken at higher latitudes exhibit greater seasonality overall, and species seldom show the same pattern across multiple language editions. These results have relevance to conservation policy formulation and to improving our understanding of what drives human interest in biodiversity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85062613242&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146
DO - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146
M3 - Article
SN - 1544-9173
VL - 17
SP - e3000146
JO - PLoS Biology
JF - PLoS Biology
IS - 3
ER -