Springer has pre-released our article in Biodiversity and Conservation
through Online First on their website at the adjacent link.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10531-013-0476-6
Biodiversity and Conservation (Online First)
March 2013
Google search patterns suggest declining interest in the environment
Malcolm L. Mccallum, Gwendolyn W. Bury
Abstract
Public interest in most aspects of the environment is sharply
declining relative to other subjects, as measured by internet searches
performed on Google. Changes in the search behavior by the public are
closely tied to their interests, and those interests are critical to
driving public policy. Google Insights for Search (GIFS) was a tool
that provided access to search data but is now combined with another
tool, Google Trends. We used GIFS to obtain data for 19
environment-related terms from 2001 to 2009. The only
environment-related term with large positive slope was climate change.
All other terms that we queried had strong negative slopes indicating
that searches for these topics dropped over the last decade. Our
results suggest that the public is growing less interested in the
environment.
--
Malcolm L. McCallum
Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
School of Biological Sciences
University of Missouri at Kansas City
Managing Editor,
Herpetological Conservation and Biology
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