In the “digital conservation” age, big data from Earth observations and from social media have been increasingly used to tackle conservation challenges. In this paper, led by Sofía Vaz from IISTA-CEAMA (Granada, Spain), we combined information from those two digital sources in a multimodel inference framework to identify, map, and predict the potential for nature's cultural contributions to people in two contrasting UNESCO biosphere reserves: Doñana and Sierra Nevada (Spain).
The content analysis of social media photographs showed a dominance of different categories of nature's cultural contributions, in agreement with the natural and cultural capital of these biosphere reserves. Those contributions also related with different Earth observation predictors, being mostly shaped by visual‐sensory attributes that characterize Doñana landscapes, and by points of leisure interest, landscape heterogeneity, and environmental accessibility that shape Sierra Nevada. The analytical framework proposed in this study is reproducible in other (protected) areas, and it can aid in the cost‐efficient monitoring of nature's contributions to people.
Vaz, AS; Moreno‐Llorca, RA; Gonçalves, JF; Vicente, JR; Méndez, PF; Revilla, E; Santamaria, L; Bonet‐García, FJ; Honrado, JP; Alcaraz‐Segura, D (2020) Digital conservation in biosphere reserves: Earth observations, social media, and nature's cultural contributions to people. Conservation Letters, e12704. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12704
