From virtual tourism to citizen science

From virtual tourism to citizen science: Investigating how publics produce and consume datafied wildlife in Sweden

This project investigates the public’s changing relations to wildlife in a digital era of wildlife surveillance, web livestreams, and citizen science apps. Recognizing that encounters with wild animals are increasingly mediated via screens, we will examine what impacts digital practices with wildlife have upon human-wildlife relations and whether these interactions translate into non-digital encounters and outcomes. The latter includes impacts on conservation, input in management, and physical encounters with wildlife. We use a three-pronged method to apprehend 1) sites of production of wildlife imaging, in the form of field observations at recording sites; 2) sites of online consumption, through digital ethnography of web platforms where digital wildlife circulate and 3) inperson interviews with users. Our case studies correspond to different modalities for producing and consuming digital wildlife in Sweden, including streaming moose migrations for entertainment (SVT’s The Great Moose Migration); endangered wildlife for conservation by the World Wildlife Fund (guillemots and Baltic Sea cam) and uploading media to the Swedish Hunting Association’s upcoming platform Viltbild to inform wildlife management. We pioneer a digital ecologies methodology. This merges qualitative and quantitative methods and online and physical methods to capture how representations of wild animals travel from a physical form to data across various media. Our project will expose how various publics—hunters, urban residents, and hobby conservationists—produce, circulate, and consume digital wildlife and how these digital encounters unfold, with what real-life consequences. Through this research, we develop digital citizen science etiquette on wildlife surveillance that considers also different technologies and devices’ impact on new concerns like animal privacy. Also, we formulate recommendations for developers streaming wildlife to better match the needs and expectations of the public.

Erica Von Essen, Stockholm University

3 900 000 SEK