Social media websites Flickr and Reddit as a novel source of data for cultural ecosystem service assessments

Nathan Fox, Katherine E Parks and Felix Eigenbrod, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom, Laura Graham, Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, James M. Bullock, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, United Kingdom

Background/Question/Methods
Social media sites are gaining traction as a source of novel data for cultural ecosystem service (CES) assessments. In particular, the image and video sharing platform Flickr has previously been used to assess both the spatial distribution of CES as well as providing information on human-nature interactions through image content analysis. However, methods for accessing these datasets requires knowledge of advanced coding skills. Furthermore, some social media websites, such as the social news aggregation and discussion-based website Reddit, are not currently being used in CES research. Here, we discuss novel approaches to obtaining social media data that includes previously unexplored sources. First, we demonstrate the “photosearcher” R package, which is designed to facilitate accessible and reproducible methods of searching social media sites for relevant data for non-data scientists. Second, we validate the potential uses of Reddit in contributing to CES assessments. As post to Reddit are not geolocated, we have developed an automated method of geocoding the approximate location of Reddit posts by extracting place names from the posts textual metadata using named-entity recognition.
Results/Conclusions:
Overall, both Flickr and Reddit can provide a comparably large quantity of data relating to specific services, though posts relating to certain activities can be more popular on either site. Reddit provides a novel source of data in the form of textual posts, as well as having a greater number of people commenting on posts. Though it is possible to georeferenced the location of posts from Reddit, the limitations associated with the georeferencing process constraints the use of Reddit for assessing the spatial variation in CES. By comparing posts relating to recreational activities we have highlighted the relative value of these two sites for CES assessments. Both sites can provide a large quantity of images for image content analysis, however, Flickr is more suited to spatial analysis and Reddit to the analysis of textual metadata. By providing accessible and reproducible methods of accessing social media data and by highlighting the value of big data from Reddit we hope to encourage its inclusion in future CES and environmental research.