Tampa Bay red tide tweet dashboard: Using Twitter/X to inform understanding of harmful algal blooms in the Tampa Bay region

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) of Karenia brevis, more commonly known as “red tide”, have been increasing in frequency and severity, presenting recurring environmental issues for Florida’s Gulf coast. While local resource managers typically use field-based measurements to assess the direct effects of red tide, e.g., dead fish counts and beach reports of respiratory irritation, alternative data sources that leverage social media to assess public perception and awareness have received less attention. With the exponential growth of social media over the past 15 years, these alternative data sources present potentially valuable opportunities to fill knowledge gaps in regard to public discourse around red tide. Using Twitter/X as the social media platform, we created a dashboard that summarizes text data and posting activity on red tide, focusing on the Tampa Bay area, which experienced substantial bloom events over the past few years. The dashboard provides multiple analytical summaries of the text data, including word clouds of most frequent terms, a heatmap of the most mentioned counties, and time series of posting frequency by term. This paper describes the dashboard architecture, deployment, functionality, and use cases. The dashboard was co-developed with regional stakeholders and researchers and is expected to have utility for local resource management organizations, along with a broader research community interested in studying HAB events. The final product is a novel source of information that produces additional insights into public knowledge and sentiment on red tide that can complement more conventional forms of in situ monitoring.