| Project Detail |
Human actions are eroding biodiversity and consequently reducing the contributions nature provides to people. Research has thus far had a strong focus on investigating the direct drivers of biodiversity loss, such as land use change, and their impacts on biodiversity. However, we are still lacking information about how sociocultural, economic, and other indirect drivers affect these direct drivers and consequently biodiversity. A key research priority is to investigate how societal values of nature and human behaviour underpin these indirect and direct drivers and consequently affect the transformative potential for positive and durable changes to human relationships with nature of conservation actions. The project draws from the emerging field of conservation culturomics that takes advantage of digital data sources and methods to study human-nature interactions and employs cutting-edge research methods, including Big Data analytics, video games, and online social surveys, to fill knowledge gaps at multiple scales. By combining social media data and online traditional surveys, it will be possible to understand preferences for species, diverse values of biodiversity, and the sentiment of people experiencing nature. Multimodal analyses of videos and video games will be used to study the potential for behaviour change, including for large carnivore conservation in Europe, and to understand what the diverse motivations supporting pro-conservation behaviour are. Biodiversity footprint calculations and a novel framework for species risk assessment will allow exploring impacts of international trade, culture, and other indirect drivers on biodiversity. Large language models and spatial prioritization will help identify priority conservation actions and areas where they should be implemented. When successful, the project will produce transformational knowledge on diverse perspectives and motivations for actions that can bring about change for biodiversity conservation. |
