A Digital Approach to Quantify the Cultural Salience of Value Generating Practices in Brazilian Coastal Parks
A Digital Approach to Quantify the Cultural Salience of Value Generating Practices in Brazilian Coastal Parks
Brazil is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, but its environmental leadership and protected areas (PAs) network have been undermined by controversial political decisions. In order to secure PAs maintenance in the long-term, there is a need to clarify the set of values they provide to society, beyond the traditional biodiversity value. Here, we employed an automatized approach to evaluate Value Generating Practices (VGPs) in the 26 Brazilian coastal parks. For this, we used the most popular World Wide Web searcher to quantify web pages that mention VGPs in our targeted protected areas. Our 3,355 searches strings returned 11M+ web pages mentioning VGPs in Brazilian coastal parks. The majority of web pages mentioned VGPs in state parks, but the average cultural salience (log transformed absolute numbers) indicate that national parks are more salient for both Portuguese and English written web pages. Generally, VGPs related to social recreation were the most salient, followed by use of natural resources, commercial activity and recreation in nature. Though some limitations can be identified, we believe that the World Wide Web is a suitable index to measure VGPs in virtually any protected area. Finally, the advance of technological devices and analytical tools in the following years may improve the automation of VGPs identification and provide a promising tool to uncover hidden values in protected areas, increasing the set of arguments that society need to justify these areas as important spaces for both people and nature.