Tweeting the Laurentian Great Lakes: A community opinion analysis about Great Lakes areas as assessed through mentions on Twitter |
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| Affiliation: | 1. School of Freshwater Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 600 E. Greenfield Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53204, United States;2. Department of Rhetoric & Writing and The Center for Health Communication, The University of Texas at Austin, Par 29, Austin, TX 78712, United States;1. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania. 102 Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;2. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA;1. Great Lakes Center, SUNY Buffalo State, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222, USA;2. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Great Lakes National Program Office, Chicago, IL, USA;3. Alumnus, Great Lakes Laboratory for Fisheries and Aquatic Science, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Burlington, Ontario L7R4A6, Canada;4. Aquatic Ecostudies Limited, 287 Miller Road, Dutton, Ontario N0L 1J0, Canada;1. Michigan State University, Department of Community Sustainability, 480 Wilson Road, East Lansing, MI 48823, United States;2. Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, Office of the Great Lakes, 525 West Allegan Street, PO Box 30473, Lansing, MI 48909, United States;1. Illinois State Geological Survey, Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 701 North Point Drive, Winthrop Harbor, IL 60096, USA;2. Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, 673 Auditorium Rd., Rm 122, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA |
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| Abstract: | Accounting for community opinions of environmental restoration is critical both for planning and evaluating these initiatives. While considerable research assesses the value of restoration through economic metrics focusing on expenditures or preferences for ecosystem services, these metrics may not adequately account for the sociocultural services that ecosystems provide communities, such as mental and physical health or recreational opportunities. To address this challenge, we explored the use of social media data to assess online discourse communities’ opinions about ecosystem services through a case study of Twitter mentions of sites targeted for restoration through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). While there is evidence of the economic and ecological benefits of GLRI, little is known about how these benefits at sites targeted for funding are perceived by the public. From April through October 2019, we collected 40,000 tweets that mentioned an Area of Concern or a Great Lakes National Park that received GLRI funding. We used a mixed-methodological approach combining tweet content and sentiment analysis to determine themes of discussion and characterize online discourse communities’ opinions around these topics. Half of all tweets were about one of three Areas of Concern, and recreation was the most discussed theme with an overall positive sentiment. A metric accounting for the number of tweets and the sentiment of tweets was derived to understand community opinions of restoration at these areas. Our findings demonstrate the potential of social media data mining as a tool for examining online conversations about and engagement with the Great Lakes. |
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| Keywords: | Opinion Mining Twitter Cultural Ecosystem Services Content Analysis Sentiment Analysis Social Media Great Lakes Restoration Initiative |
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