Authors: Vardi, Reut; Roll, Uri;

Conservation culturomic enables the exploration of human-nature interactions and cultural ecosystem services at scales unimaginable until recently. Nonetheless, these tools and datasets entail inherent biases and necessitate careful validation. Here, we analyzed various digital data to construct a framework linking digital sources with species’ cultural ecosystem services. We explored interactions with wildflowers in Israel across different culturomic sources including social media, search engines, online encyclopedias, and popular media articles, as well as large online scientific databases, and citizen science platforms. These sources represent different types of engagement with nature, by different segments of society. We found that different platforms highlight different species and traits with most discrepancies between popular news media and a national scientific repository. Furthermore, salience in Flickr, a social media platform often used for cultural ecosystem services analysis, does not correlate with any other source. Our results suggest that people’s digital interactions with nature may be inherently different across sources and platforms. Thus, analyzing multiple digital sources may allow better understanding of the wealth, span, and value of different human-nature interactions across the digital realm.