Geographical, biological, and cultural factors that influence the cultural salience of bird species from the Caatinga

Abstract Birds are among the most threatened vertebrates in Brazil’s Caatinga biome due to habitat loss and hunting; understanding public interest is vital to mobilizing support for conservation. We employed conservation culturomics to quantify the online cultural salience of Caatinga birds, analyzing 127,135 Flickr records for all 548 species (including 27 nationally threatened species) tagged with both scientific and Portuguese/English common names. We modeled the effects of the extent of occurrence, body size, endemism, extinction risk, and human use on salience using a negative-binomial GLMM with taxonomic family as a random effect. Cultural salience increased with the extent of occurrence and body size, as well as with human use, but decreased for endemic species; however, extinction risk showed no significant effect. These patterns suggest that larger and more widespread species tend to dominate public attention, while endemic and threatened taxa are underrepresented online. We conclude that targeted communication and outreach are needed to raise the visibility of endemic and threatened birds and to align public attention with conservation priorities. This is the first Caatinga-wide, image-based assessment integrating ecological, geographical, and cultural predictors in a single model to explain species’ online salience, offering actionable insights for evidence-based conservation planning.