Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Increased public awareness is crucial to mitigate the ongoing loss of biodiversity worldwide, and conservation culturomics offers a way to quantify this awareness and its implications for conservation. Large online data repositories provide an opportunity to measure the awareness, even for groups such as plants that receive less attention in global conservation analyses. We used Wikipedia page views of vascular plants across ten language editions (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish) as a proxy for public awareness and quantified the differences across extinction risk, documented human use, and geographic range size. We found that overall, threatened species tend to have fewer page views, contrary to expectations. However, when we accounted for the covariates of range size and human use, this effect is reversed, with threatened species having more page views than non-threatened species. Unsurprisingly, useful species with larger range sizes (mostly non-threatened and Data Deficient) tend to receive more page views than those without documented use, suggesting that people are inclined to search online for plants that provide provisioning services. Our results strongly suggest that there is heightened public awareness of threatened plants in their local-language on Wikipedia. We present the first global study of vascular plants using Wikipedia page views as a proxy for public awareness, through conservation culturomics to understand human-plant relationships.</p>