Identifying Charismatic Bird Species and Traits with Community Science Observations

Abstract

Identifying which species are perceived as charismatic can improve the impact and efficiency of conservation outreach, as charismatic species receive more conservation funding and have their conservation needs prioritized (9; 17; 13). Sociological experiments studying animal charisma have relied on stated preferences to find correlations between hypothetical “willingness to pay” or “empathy” for a species’ conservation and species’ size, color, and aesthetic appeal (51; 13; 16). Recognizing the increasing availability of digital records of public engagement with animals that reveal preferences, an emerging field of “culturomics” uses Google search results, Wikipedia article activities, and other digital modes of engagement to identify charismatic species and traits (46; 31; 10; 41). In this study, we take advantage of community science efforts as another form of digital data that can reveal observer preferences. We apply a multi-stage analysis to ask whether opportunistic birders contributing to iNaturalist engage more with larger, more colorful, and rarer birds relative to a baseline, from eBird contributors, approximating unbiased detection. We find that body mass, color contrast, and range size all predict over-representation in the opportunistic dataset. We also find evidence that, across 473 modeled species, 52 species are significantly overreported and 158 are significantly underreported, indicating a wide variety of species-specific effects. Understanding which birds are charismatic can aid conservationists in creating impactful outreach materials and engaging new naturalists. The quantified differences between two prominent community science efforts may also be of use for researchers leveraging the data from one or both of them to answer scientific questions of interest.