TY - JOUR

T1 - Fair concordance between Google Trends and Danish ornithologists in the assessment of temporal trends in Danish bird populations highlights the informational value of big data

AU - Jensen, Per M.

AU - Danielsen, Finn

AU - Jacobsen, Stine K.

AU - Vikstrøm, Thomas

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2024.

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - The ongoing depletion of natural systems and associated biodiversity decline is of growing international concern. Climate change is expected to exacerbate anthropogenic impacts on wild populations. The scale of impact on ecosystems and ecosystem services will be determined by the impact on a multitude of species and functional groups, which due to their biology and numbers are difficult to monitor. The IPCC has argued that surveillance or monitoring is critical and proposed that monitoring systems should be developed, which not only track developments but also function as “early warning systems.” Human populations are already generating large continuous datasets on multiple taxonomic groups through internet searches. These time series could in principle add substantially to current monitoring if they reflect true changes in the natural world. We here examined whether information on internet search frequencies delivered by the Danish population and captured by Google Trends (GT) appropriately informs on population trends in 106 common Danish bird species. We compared the internet search activity with independent equivalent population trend assessments from the Danish Ornithological Society (BirdLife Denmark/DOF). We find a fair concordance between the GT trends and the assessments by DOF. A substantial agreement can be obtained by omitting species without clear temporal trends. Our findings suggest that population trend proxies from internet search frequencies can be used to supplement existing wildlife population monitoring and to ask questions about an array of ecological phenomena, which potentially can be integrated into an early warning system for biodiversity under climate change.

AB - The ongoing depletion of natural systems and associated biodiversity decline is of growing international concern. Climate change is expected to exacerbate anthropogenic impacts on wild populations. The scale of impact on ecosystems and ecosystem services will be determined by the impact on a multitude of species and functional groups, which due to their biology and numbers are difficult to monitor. The IPCC has argued that surveillance or monitoring is critical and proposed that monitoring systems should be developed, which not only track developments but also function as “early warning systems.” Human populations are already generating large continuous datasets on multiple taxonomic groups through internet searches. These time series could in principle add substantially to current monitoring if they reflect true changes in the natural world. We here examined whether information on internet search frequencies delivered by the Danish population and captured by Google Trends (GT) appropriately informs on population trends in 106 common Danish bird species. We compared the internet search activity with independent equivalent population trend assessments from the Danish Ornithological Society (BirdLife Denmark/DOF). We find a fair concordance between the GT trends and the assessments by DOF. A substantial agreement can be obtained by omitting species without clear temporal trends. Our findings suggest that population trend proxies from internet search frequencies can be used to supplement existing wildlife population monitoring and to ask questions about an array of ecological phenomena, which potentially can be integrated into an early warning system for biodiversity under climate change.

KW - Google Trends

KW - Population trends

KW - Validation, Bird species

U2 - 10.1007/s10661-024-12439-y

DO - 10.1007/s10661-024-12439-y

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 38366261

AN - SCOPUS:85185393018

VL - 196

JO - Environmental Monitoring and Assessment

JF - Environmental Monitoring and Assessment

SN - 0167-6369

IS - 3

M1 - 276

ER -