Using social media records to inform conservation planning

Abstract Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega‐populated country, we examined the importance of social media records in conservation decision‐making. We collated species distribution records for birds and butterflies from Facebook and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), grouped them into GBIF‐only and combined GBIF and Facebook data, and investigated the differences in identifying critical conservation areas. Adding Facebook data to GBIF data improved the accuracy of systematic conservation planning assessments by identifying additional important conservation areas in the northwest, southeast, and central…