Citizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among naturalists but remain heavily biased taxonomically and geographically. However, with the explosive popularity of social media and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones, many post wildlife photographs on social media. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these data to enhance our biodiversity understanding using Bangladesh, a tropical biodiverse country, as a case study. We compared biodiversity records extracted from Facebook with those from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), collating geospatial records for 1013 unique species, including 970 species from Facebook and 712 species from GBIF. Although most observation records were biased toward major cities, the Facebook records were more evenly spatially distributed. About 86% of the Threatened species records were from Facebook, whereas the GBIF records were almost entirely Of Least Concern species. To reduce the global biodiversity data shortfall, a key research priority now is the development of mechanisms for extracting and interpreting social media biodiversity data.

中文翻译：

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通过社交媒体增加生物多样性知识：热带孟加拉国的案例研究

公民科学项目在博物学家中越来越受欢迎，但在分类学和地理上仍然存在严重偏见。然而，随着社交媒体的爆炸性流行和智能手机的普及，许多人在社交媒体上发布野生动物照片。在这里，我们以热带生物多样性国家孟加拉国作为案例研究，说明收集这些数据以增强我们对生物多样性的了解的潜力。我们将从 Facebook 提取的生物多样性记录与从全球生物多样性信息设施 (GBIF) 提取的生物多样性记录进行了比较，整理了 1013 个独特物种的地理空间记录，其中包括来自 Facebook 的 970 个物种和来自 GBIF 的 712 个物种。尽管大多数观测记录都偏向于主要城市，但 Facebook 记录的空间分布更为均匀。大约 86% 的受威胁物种记录来自 Facebook，而 GBIF 记录几乎全部是最不关心的物种。为了减少全球生物多样性数据的短缺，现在的一个关键研究重点是开发提取和解释社交媒体生物多样性数据的机制。