Conservation campaigns via digital media are becoming increasingly popular amongst conservationists. However, effectively measuring their impacts remains a challenge, and campaign effectiveness often goes unmeasured. Conservation culturomics, which explores the intricate relationship between people and nature in the digital sphere, can help fill this gap. Here, we used culturomics data to evaluate impacts of two digital conservation campaigns: one regional campaign promoting the importance of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot in India and one global campaign using humorous skits to address broader conservation themes. Specifically, we used a synthetic control approach to analyze Wikipedia pageviews of topics featured in the two campaigns and compared these to Wikipedia pageviews of related topics that were not featured in the campaigns. We found that across 21 topics in multiple languages, the regional campaign showed limited success in boosting engagement for specific topics in local languages, whereas the global campaign had no measurable impact on Wikipedia page views. We also found evidence on negative impact for one topic in the regional campaign. Overall, we found a limited effect of the campaigns in increasing online traffic to Wikipedia, with the impact detected being associated with localized topics as opposed to global ones. The study highlights the utility of combining digital data with counterfactual-based methods for rapid, cost-effective evaluations while acknowledging the need for deeper investigation into how digital engagement translates to real-world behavior change. Future research should explore integrating digital and traditional evaluation methods to enhance the evidence base for conservation communication strategies.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a rare opportunity to examine effects of people on natural systems and processes. Here, we collected fish diversity data from coral reefs at the Israeli Gulf of Aqaba during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. We examined beach entrances to the reef, nearby shallow reefs and deeper areas exposed mostly to divers. We found that the lockdown elicited a behavioral response that resulted in elevated species richness at designated reef entrances, predominantly influenced by increased evenness without changes to total abundances. This effect was observed both at the local scale and when several beach entrances were aggregated together. Consequently, non-extractive human activities may have substantial short-term impacts on fish diversity. Our insights could help designate guidelines to manage visitor impacts on coral reefs and aid in their prolonged persistence.

The ongoing digital revolution in the age of big data is opening new research opportunities. Culturomics and iEcology, two emerging research areas based on the analysis of online data resources, can provide novel scientific insights and inform conservation and management efforts. To date, culturomics and iEcology have been applied primarily in the terrestrial realm. Here, we advocate for expanding such applications to the aquatic realm by providing a brief overview of these new approaches and outlining key areas in which culturomics and iEcology are likely to have the highest impact, including the management of protected areas; fisheries; flagship species identification; detection and distribution of threatened, rare, and alien species; assessment of ecosystem status and anthropogenic impacts; and social impact assessment. When deployed in the right context with awareness of potential biases, culturomics and iEcology are ripe for rapid development as low-cost research approaches based on data available from digital sources, with increasingly diverse applications for aquatic ecosystems.