A Citizen-Centred Sentiment Analysis Towards India’s Critically Endangered Avian and Mammalian Species

Abstract

Conservation Science (CS), nowadays, is a vital area for research and development because of its linkage with multiple domains. Sustainable goals as populated by the United Nations also emphasis on the need of the hour to protect biodiversity both on land and in water. In stimulating the research in this area, the role of citizen participation has evolved to a larger extent in this direction. Social media plays a significant role in providing citizen-centric data for analysing multifaceted problems. A lot of notable research in the past was carried out for determining illegal trade of animal species, threat and popularity assessment, animal identification in camera trap pictures, etc. using social media. However, analysis of people’s attitudes towards endangered species based upon different factors lacks in the number of studies and not has been covered in a well-versed manner. This research comprises the sentiment analysis of tweets concerned with the five most critically endangered Indian avian and mammalian Species. The study evaluates the variability in the sentiment scores and the intensity of the information shared for these different species using the Valence Aware Dictionary for sentiment reasoning algorithm. The lower number of tweets is due to less popularity of the species among citizens. However, the negative sentiments for even the most popular species signify the exasperation towards ineffectiveness of popular flagship programs.