Tropibio junior researcher Felipe A Santos presented at CIBIO

Tropibio junior researcher Felipe A Santos from the Postgraduate Program in Biological Diversity and Conservation in the Tropics (PPG-DIBICT) of Federal University of Alagoas, Maceió, Brazil made an oral presentation about Cultural ecosystem services at the " CASUAL SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION” at CIBIO. 

Title: IDENTIFICATION OF CULTURAL ECOSYSTEM SERVICES USING SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

Abstract: Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are the non-material contributions that people receive from nature and are generally challenging to measure and map. In this study, we downloaded thousands of social media photographs taken across more than 8.500km of a tropical coastline and used machine learning to analyze their content and identify CES. We were able to identify and map 5 categories of CES and compared CES counts and richness between sustainable use areas, strictly protected areas and non-protected areas. We found that strictly PA had more counts and richness of CES when compared with areas under lower categories of protection. While not all CES categories can be adequately captured using this approach it can provide crucial information for local management and has proven extremely fast and cheap if compared with traditional methodologies such as face-to-face interviews. We hope that advances in computer vision algorithms will allow an even more accurate identification of CES in the near future.

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