AbstractCitizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among naturalists but remain
heavily biased taxonomically and geographically. However, with the explosive popularity of
social media and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones, many post wildlife
photographs on social media. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these data to
enhance our biodiversity understanding using Bangladesh, a tropical biodiverse country, as
a case study. We compared biodiversity records extracted from Facebook with those from the
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), collating geospatial records for 1013
unique species, including 970 species from Facebook and 712 species from GBIF. Although
most observation records were biased toward major cities, the Facebook records were more
evenly spatially distributed. About 86% of the Threatened species records were from
Facebook, whereas the GBIF records were almost entirely Of Least Concern species. To
reduce the global biodiversity data shortfall, a key research priority now is the
development of mechanisms for extracting and interpreting social media biodiversity
data.