Social media data can help to understand the versatile human activities in and the preferences towards nature. There are several approaches for acquiring and analyzing these data which we present in our new paper “Social media data for conservation science: A methodological overview”. In particular, we

(i) describe what kind of relevant information can be retrieved from social media platforms
(ii) provide a detailed overview of advanced methods for spatio-temporal, content and network analyses
(iii) exemplify the potential of these approaches for real-world conservation challenges
(iv) discuss the limitations of social media data analysis in conservation science

We hope this paper is useful for conservation scientists and practitioners, as well as to others interested in studying human-nature interactions with novel data sources!

Link to the openaccess publication in Biological conservation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.01.023
Link to the press release: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/science-news/understanding-human-nature-interactions-using-social-media-data