Because of recent urbanization, growing number of people are now living in cities and people’s contact with nature is decreasing. This reduction in contact with nature, particularly experiences with nature in childhood is known to affect person’s positive attitude on nature and willingness to conserve it. Because both direct and indirect experience with nature is known to improve people’s positive attitude on natrue and support for conservation, measurements increasing people’s opportunity to have contact with nature both in direct and indirect ways are essential to attain support for conservation policies. Yet, because we do not have ways to know spatial distribution of people’s contact with nature, it is difficult to know regions requiring such measurements. I thought people’s interest on plants could be used as an indicator of people’s contact with nature and social networking service (SNS) data could be used to map it.
In this study, I collected Tweets having spatial reference from 2013–2017 and mapped richness of native, exotic and cultivated species per number of Tweets as a proxy of people’s interest on plants in 1km resolution in Japan. Also, I modeled species richness as a function of landuse pattern using the Random Forest method.
Results/Conclusions
The species richness was higher in large cities like Tokyo and Osaka and their surrounding areas. This spatial convergence seemed to be stronger for cultivated species and weaker for native species, and exotic species showed intermediate convergence. Although the Random Forest models of the three species richness having same values of explanatory variables, results showed that predictive ability of the model was high for cultivated species, medium for exotic species and low for native species, indicating spatial patterns of people’s interest were different among the species groups. Also, partial relationship between explanatory variables and species richness showed that among the explanatory variables tested (proportions of urban area, agricultural lands, natural forest, plantation, open water and urban green space and landuse diversity in a grid) proportion of urban area had positive and the strongest effect on species richness whereas proportion of green area (natural forest and urban green space) had negligible effect. These results may indicate that people living in urban area tend to have higher interest on plants and if interest of plants in fact represents people’s contact with nature, the results indicates that people living in urban area may have higher support for nature conservation.