Authors: Ladle, Richard; dos Santos, Jhonatan;Correia, Ricardo;Mendes Malhado, Ana Claudia;

Protected areas (PAs) are often seen as opportunity costs and are therefore vulnerable to political decisions. PAs with high levels of public support should be more resilient to such decisions because; i) politicians in democratic societies are reluctant to make unpopular/controversial decisions that go against public opinion, and; ii) the proposed development of popular PAs is more likely to be met by vigorous public resistance. Nevertheless, public interest and, by extension, support for protected areas has rarely been considered in PA risk assessments. We propose an innovative approach to assessing the political vulnerability of PAs that combines indices of developmental pressures with an innovative culturomic-derived metric of public interest based on Wikipedia page views. We use this to quantify the political vulnerability status of 523 Brazilian PAs. Large number of PAs are identified as politically vulnerable, having a combination of high developmental pressure and low/very low levels of public interest. Such PAs should take measures to increase public interest to ensure a healthy base of public support in the future. More generally, digital metrics of public interest are simply and inexpensively generated, and could be easily incorporated into the existing assessment systems.