Nile Stephenson on the benefits of using social media to monitor the natural world

Social media can help scientists track animal species, according to a new study on which University of Cambridge PhD student Nile Stephenson is lead author.

The researchers found it can help provide additional data that traditional recording methods would miss.

Examining posts about Jersey tiger moths on Instagram and Flickr, the research found the moths are unexpectedly common in urban areas and – more importantly – the findings demonstrate how social media can be used to monitor our fast-changing natural world.

“What we wanted to know is whether records from social media could be used to study where species are found, and it turns out that they can,” says Nile.

“So particularly photographs on Instagram can show us that certain species can be found in areas like towns and cities – and that sort of thing’s missed by our traditional recording schemes, which tend to record species in rural environments, because that’s where they’re traditionally found.

“Our research has shown that using Instagram might be really useful for studying species that are moving their distributions, particularly species in cities.”

Nile, a member of the Deep-time Ecology Group in the Department of Zoology, adds: “I think a lot of species, especially species that are on the move at the moment because of climate change, they’re often human-associated.

“So we do expect them to turn up in towns and cities, but that’s never really been shown using data like this before.

“And one of the problems is that, like I said, traditional recording schemes would say, ‘If you wanted to find a moth, you would go and look in a meadow’, for instance, or you would go and look in some woodlands – you wouldn’t typically go and look in your local park or in somebody’s garden.

“But people on Instagram are recording these species in their gardens or in a park, or on their commute to work or something like that.

“So that reveals that these species are present here, and that’s really useful data that people could start to use.”

Nile has been working with the museum collections, under its curator of non-insect invertebrates, Dr Emily Mitchell.

“I predominantly work on the ecology of coral reefs and on paleontology, so this paper that we’ve just had published isn’t usually what I work on at all,” he explains.

Nile, who is affiliated with St Catharine’s College, completed his master’s degree at the University of Exeter five years ago, and his paper, recently published in the Ecology and Evolution open access online journal, is related to his studies on that course.

Nile believes the study, led by the University of Exeter with Dr Regan Early and funded by Research England, is not only beneficial from a nature point of view.

It is also useful in showing that “social media can be used positively – and could be used by scientists to record where species are found, particularly species that are moving”.

Originally from Oxford, Nile completed his undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth University and aims to continue after his studies beyond his PhD.

“I want to continue in research,” he said. “I find the coral reefs really interesting, especially since they’re in an ecosystem that’s being damaged by climate change at the moment, and they’re an important ecosystem as well.

“So I’m really looking at staying on in Cambridge to continue that research.”

Read the paper at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.71086.