Bronwen Hunter

The talk was given as part of Sussex AI Seminar Series, on Wednesday 6th November 2024.

Title: The exploitation of wild species: exploiting the internet for data

Bio: Bronwen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ecological and Epidemiological Modelling within the School of Life Sciences. Her postdoc is exploring the ecological risk factors for zoonotic disease transmission from bats (Chiroptera) in Europe. Bronwen recently completed her PhD at Sussex with Julie Weeds and Fiona Mathews, which assessed the potential for online data sources, such a social media, to improve our understanding of large-scale patterns of wildlife exploitation. Using the case study of bats, she developed new tools to collate and analyse disparate data sources, using machine learning and spatial modelling.

Abstract: The hunting, trapping trade and consumption of wild species, known as wildlife exploitation, is a principal driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss. However, data on the location and intensity of exploitation is lacking in many regions, due to the challenging and resource intensive nature of field research. The increasing availability and global reach of data from online platforms, such as social media, news and blogs, could present a unique opportunity to fill in knowledge gaps. Relevant content can be complex to identify from online searches, is susceptible to bias, and its reliability in representing on the ground trends has not been comprehensively assessed. We aimed to investigate if and how data from online sources could be used to understand large scale patterns of wildlife exploitation, using the case study of bats (Chiroptera). As part of this, we evaluated and applied a suite of custom and off-the-shelf text analysis tools, in order to collect and extract data from sources relevant to bat exploitation from social media, search engines and e-commerce sites. This work also included conducting the first longitudinal monitoring study of the online trade in bat taxidermy and specimens.