Crowdsourcing Wildlife Data From Social Media

• Ellen Kidane

With modern image analysis technologies and platforms like Wildbook, it is becoming possible to use images from social media platforms to identify individual animals and obtain knowledge about endangered species populations. In this study, we collected images of whale sharks, humpback whales, reticulated giraffes, iberian lynx, Grevy’s zebras, and plains zebras from YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and iNaturalist. Our data showed that the number of posts, the frequency of total wild encounters, and the posts per user varies across platforms and species. Nonetheless, social media platforms present the opportunity to be a source of wildlife monitoring data for future risk assessment.

See supporting documentation in the team’s Box drive.