Large scale spatio-temporal ecological and social datasets are often constrained by high financial costs and time-intensive methods. Social media sites have started to be recognised as a potential source of novel data for answering ecological and ecosystem service questions. The social media site Flickr hosts a large database of photographs that contain a wealth of spatial and temporal metadata which can be accessed by making calls to the Flickr application programming interface (API). Currently, images from Flickr have primarily been used to study cultural ecosystem services. This includes studies assessing the drivers of cultural ecosystem services, such as wildlife watching and recreation actives, as well as exploring visitation rates and patterns in protected areas and national parks. Flickr data is also starting to be incorporated into ecological studies and has a wide range of potential uses including species distribution modelling, monitoring invasive species and assessing changes in plant phenology. However, further uptake of Flickr data in ecological and ecosystem services studies may be hindered by several challenges associated with the accessibility and reproducibility of using the Flickr API. First, the API is only accessible through a range of programming languages, preventing authors who are not well versed in coding from being able to access the data. Second, as there is no standard methodology for downloading metadata from Flickr the reproducibility of studies is often limited. Finally, the Flickr API has additional limitations including restrictions to searches and the number of results available.
Results/Conclusions
Here, we developed an R package - photosearcher - which allows for accessible and reproducible access to the API, as well as addressing other API limitations. We showcase this package with two cases studies. First, we demonstrate the ease of using the package to obtain ecological datasets by giving examples of how geotagged photographs can be used to map species distribution. Second, we explain how the data obtained from the photosearcher package can be used in cultural ecosystem services studies by visualising visitation patterns in a protected area. The photosearcher R package presents researchers with an accessible and reproducible method of accessing social datasets Flickr API. Furthermore, using photosearcher provides researchers a quick and inexpensive alternative to conventional data collection methods. We hope that the photosearcher R package will allow for a wider use of data from Flickr in ecological and ecosystem service studies.