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conCultuR: An R package for reproducible conservation culturomics across digital platforms
Summary
Researchers built a free software tool that tracks how much public attention endangered species and environmental issues (like plastic pollution) get on platforms like Google, Wikipedia, and news outlets. This matters because it helps scientists and health advocates measure whether the public is actually paying attention to important issues—like plastic pollution—rather than assuming attention equals real-world risk; the tool includes a case study using Earth Day as an example of tracking spikes in plastic pollution awareness. It's not a health study itself, but a measurement tool that could help researchers better understand public awareness gaps around environmental health threats.
This archive contains the reproducibility package for the manuscript entitled “conCultuR: An R package for reproducible conservation culturomics across digital platforms.” conCultuR is an R package for reproducible conservation culturomics. It provides a measurement framework for estimating, auditing and interpreting biodiversity-related digital attention across heterogeneous digital platforms. The package supports construction of biodiversity concept dictionaries, query ambiguity audits, collection or import of digital attention traces, platform-specific standardisation, concept-level attention indices, platform disagreement diagnostics, query sensitivity analysis, attention-gap analysis relative to user-supplied reference scales and event-associated attention diagnostics. This Zenodo archive preserves the exact materials used for manuscript submission. It includes the conCultuR source package, software validation supplement, real-data analysis scripts, archived input and output tables, generated figures, metadata files, checksums and GitHub Pages tutorial source materials. The archive is intended to provide a frozen, citable and versioned record of the software and analyses used in the manuscript. The archive includes two real-data worked examples. The first example evaluates digital attention gaps for threatened species and other conservation concepts using live digital traces. The second example evaluates event-associated attention dynamics for an environmental issue, using plastic pollution around Earth Day as a focal case. These examples demonstrate how conCultuR can be used to diagnose biodiversity-related public attention as a conditional communication signal rather than as a direct measure of ecological value, extinction risk or conservation priority. The example scripts include live data collection code for Wikimedia Pageviews, GDELT and Google Trends. Because live digital traces may vary with date of access, platform availability, rate limits, query volume and platform-specific data processing, the archived output tables included in this record should be treated as the frozen analysis record used for the manuscript. The active development version of the package and the tutorial website are maintained at the GitHub repository. Files included in this archive 00_package_sourceSource package archive for conCultuR version 0.8.6. 01_software_validation_supplementSoftware validation materials, methodological appendices, supporting information files and machine-readable function tables. 02_analysis_scriptsR scripts used to generate the real-data examples and manuscript figures. 03_example1_attention_gapArchived inputs and outputs for the attention-gap example, including concept dictionaries, query audits, conservation-status reference data, raw traces, standardised traces, attention indices, attention-gap classifications, threshold-sensitivity outputs and manuscript summary tables. 04_example2_environmental_eventArchived inputs and outputs for the event-associated attention example, including environmental-issue dictionaries, query audits, raw traces, standardised traces, attention indices, event-effect summaries, daily deviations and placebo-date diagnostics.